The embrace of Mother Nature: appraisal processes and the regulation of affect in attachment genres

Abstract

Except for a couple of articles from cognitive film theory, theoretical writing about film has shed little light on the underlying processes governing affective film experience in relation to attachment concerns. In this paper, I explore the relevance of neuro-psychoanalytic theory in laying down a framework for understanding the viewer's experience of emotional episodes of loss primarily in romantic films and melodramas. As this paper will show, the pleasure of sad scenes – for instance, in the melodrama – has been explained by the use of ‘meta-emotion’ within a framework of cognitive appraisal theory. A personal experience in the cinema, however, has inspired me to discuss an overlooked contributor to emotional processes in sad experiences: specifically the topic of spectator affect regulation and its close relationship to physiology, bodily appraisal and attachment theory. This paper surveys some of the central concepts of ‘neuro-psychoanalysis’, which is an integration of concepts from psychoanalysis and neuroscience. I will show that it is useful to deploy the latest developments in neuro-psychoanalysis to understand the often-irrational fascination experienced by the viewer during episodes of loss in film and television.

Keywords:

• affect regulation
• coping
• appraisal
• audio-visual media
• perception
• emotion
• cognition
• neuro-psychoanalysis

Acknowledgements

In preparing this article I am indebted to comments on a paper delivered at the 7th international conference at the 7th Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image, University of Copenhagen, 24–27 June 2009.

Notes

^1. Mentalizing is the capacity to attribute mental states to other people and to understand one's own mental states, see Fonagy et al., 2004.

^2. Emotional regulation alludes to different stances of ‘neuro-physiological processes underlying emotional arousal and its management’, ‘attention processes’, ‘informational processes’, ‘internal cues’, such as the ‘internal indicators of emotional arousal’, ‘enhancing access to coping processes’, ‘helping to predict and control commonly encountered settings’ and finally ‘expressing emotions in a satisfactory way in accordance with one's own personal goals for the situation’ (Ross Thompson, cited in Fonagy et al., 2004, 94).

^3. Attuned interactions provide knowledge in later childhood via intellectually challenging practices. For example, when a newborn is in a familiar situation, she hypothesizes about when climaxes of events or behaviour will occur on the basis of former attunement. Another sign of early emotional regulation, noticeably around the infant's first year is the dynamic process of ‘social referencing’: in an unclear situation where the infant cannot decide what to do, he will search for signs in the caregiver's facial expression to figure out how to ‘modulate his own behaviour’ (Gergely and Watson, 1996).

^4. See ‘the somatic marker hypothesis’ in Bechara and Damasio 2004.