From Frames to Feelings: Visual Form, Empathy, and Narrative Engagement in Hollywood Cinema

As one of the central pillars of the entertainment industry, cinema offers enjoyment through the audience’s narrative experience of film. While past research has primarily focussed on the way in which film content shapes narrative experiences, mounting evidence suggests that the formal features of film (i.e., the medium-dependent design elements such as shot scale and editing) also crucially affect viewers. This dissertation continues this line of investigation, exploring how the visual formal features of Hollywood films shape audience empathy and engagement. Chapter 1 presents the central theoretical framework, arguing that the narrative experience may be understood through event modelling, as audiences construct mental representations of film narratives using audiovisual cues and real-world knowledge. Thus, films serve as “emotion machines”, guiding audience perceptions and emotions through the interaction between form and content. Early research into formal feature effects shows how elements like motion, lighting, and editing can affect attention, arousal, and mood, but questions remain regarding the generalisability of these effects, as well as their interaction with story content. An empirical analysis of the visual formal features of 100 empathy-eliciting Hollywood film scenes, described in Chapter 2, revealed a lack of a singular stylistic approach across scenes. However, three key stylistic principles were identified, namely: 1) reducing viewer-character distance through shot scale, 2) balancing visual complexity with physiological arousal to maintain engagement, and 3) employing smooth editing for narrative clarity. Chapter 3 experimentally investigated the impact of the formal features of 93 of these 100 scenes on the narrative engagement and empathy of 1026 participants. Face depiction and shot scale consistency emerged as the strongest predictors of the narrative experience, while empathic distress and arousal were most affected by form. However, only few formal features significantly impacted the narrative experience, and these effects were both subtle and difficult to isolate experimentally. Chapter 4 examined whether formal feature effects depend on narrative content. An experimental study with 130 university students found that formal features influenced affective empathy and empathic distress, but not cognitive empathy. Importantly, the effects of several features varied based on whether scenes were action- or dialogue-driven, confirming that film form and story content interact in shaping narrative outcomes. Finally, Chapter 5 contextualised these findings. While formal features were found to shape the narrative experience to some extent, their effects appear to be complex, subtle, and often content-dependent. It seems likely that lower-order responses to film (e.g., gaze direction, or arousal) are more universal across films and audiences, while higher-order responses (e.g., emotional engagement or transportation) are influenced by multiple factors, including form and content as well as viewer characteristics and viewing context. The dissertation offers practical insights for filmmakers on using form to enhance engagement. Meanwhile, media scholars interested in film’s societal impact should consider the potential impact of form in shaping story interpretation and narrative persuasion. Future research on formal feature effects might explore the impact of sound and music, genre differences, and the interactions between not just form and content, but also viewer and viewing environment.