Entertainment is Emotion: The Functional Architecture of the Entertainment Experience

Abstract

Current standard accounts of entertainment have regarded emotions as essential for the entertainment experience, but it has not been understood why emotions are so important for it. Recent views of entertainment as an adaptively significant activity propose that the distal cause of entertainment activity is an unconscious need for training useful capabilities, whereas the proximal cause is enjoyment of the activity for its own sake. This theoretical paper argues emotions provide the link between distal and proximal causes of engaging in entertainment. An architecture of the entertainment experience based on Steen and Owens' (2001) account of pretense play is proposed. The entertainment experience is an episode of emotions in response to an ongoing guided imagination. Two key factors are posited to shape the entertainment experience. First, interest is asserted as the “go-mechanism” of the entertainment experience. Second, the emotional reactions to the content of imagination are argued to lend coloring to the experience as well as to help train people's adaptive capacities. This architecture contributes to a solution of two problems for a theory of entertainment: the paradox of negative experiences and the perceived reality of entertainment content. In closing, a plea is made for studying the entertainee's appraisal of the entertainer's agency and qualities.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author is indebted to Werner Wirth, Jeroen Jansz, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Notes

1. A comparable claim is made by Ohler and Nieding (2006) who also consider entertainment a form of play. Play is a biologically very old adaptive function. In humans it evolved to encompass the representation of imagined events, contributing to the capacity to anticipate threats posed by real life events.

2. Ohler & Nieding (2006) observed that especially media entertainment contributes to an extension of people's behavioral array because there is a huge supply of media types, genres, and particular content, offering a particularly rich variety of playful endeavours.

3. Elsewhere (Tan, 2004) I proposed that individual preferences for media entertainment products may depend on two dimensions, namely complexity and personal relevance (or its opposite, “gratuitousness”) of the experience.