What kind of mood encourages people to work creatively in groups? Before starting her senior thesis in psychology, Jen Reid assumed that happy people would be more likely to form a cohesive and creative group than those who were sad. But her research group of eighty-four students produced surprising results. Although she cautions that her findings aren't statisticallysignificant, Reid found interesting trends.
She induced certain emotional states by showing student volunteers fifteen-minute segments from one of four films: a happy film (Ferris Bueller's Day Off), a sad film (Beaches), a scary film (Silence of the Lambs), and an emotionally neutral one (a program on electricity). They were asked to cooperate on two creativity tasks and then measured on levels of creativity and group cohesion.
The horror film group did the best on group tasks. "Silence of the Lambs produced negative emotions, but it also had positive effects for group problem-solving," she said. Results supported Reid's hypothesis that when people are disturbed or scared by horror films, they are more likely to throw themselves into a group activity to get rid of those uncomfortable feelings. "It's amazing that such a tense experience leads to group interaction," she says. "This phenomenon is being studied, but it's still largely undefined in the psychological literature." Contrary to Reid's expectations, the sad-film group also did well on the creativity tasks, presumably succeeding for reasons similar to those in the horror-film group.
Reid's most surprising finding was that the group viewing the happy film did even worse than the control group on creativity and group-bonding measures. "I think the people who watched Ferris Bueller [a comedy] didn't throw themselves into the creativity tasks because they didn't need anything else to make them happy. They were already happy from the film, and therefore saw the creativity tasks as boring by comparison," she hypothesizes. "But those same tasks were a relief from negative emotions for those who saw the sad and scary films."
Reid's thesis topic is a spinoff of research her adviser, Visiting Instructor in Psychology and Education Susan Burggraf, is conducting about the effect of horror films on socialization of adolescents. "People are starting to research the effect of films on people, but it's still pretty unusual for psychology," Reid says. "But I think studying how movies affect people emotionally, socially, and cognitively is important because film is such a big industry and an important part of our society today."
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