Sadness Breeds Gratitude: The Value of Tragedy - Miller-McCune
New research suggests watching a tragic movie or play leads us to reflect on our close relationships, which brings us pleasure.
Care to catch a production of King Lear tonight? It’s about a vain, arrogant old man who loses everything of value to him. In the last scene, he cradles the body of the devoted daughter he foolishly disowned. You’ll love it!
OK, fine — you’d rather stay home and pop in a DVD of, say, Titanic. Either way, you’ll be watching a tragedy, a genre that has captivated audiences since the era of the ancient Greeks. In inflation-adjusted dollars, three of the top 10 movies of all time — Gone With the Wind, Doctor Zhivago, and Titanic — are tragedies. Why do we willingly subject ourselves, again and again, to these sad stories?
Researchers led by Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick of Ohio State University have tentatively propose some answers. In the journal Communication Research, they present evidence that watching tragedy inspires self-reflection, which allows us to re-focus on the people in our lives we might otherwise take for granted. The melancholy emotions these tales arouse ultimately provoke pleasant feelings of gratitude.
“Psychological research suggests that close relationships make people happy and fulfilled,” they write. “Tragedies appear to be an excellent means to reinforcing pro-social values that make these relationships steady and meaningful, as they celebrate enduring love, friendship and compassion even in ultimate agony and suffering.”
The researchers conducted an experiment featuring 361 undergraduates. They don’t break out the results by gender, but the participants were pretty evenly matched: 211 females and 150 males.
The students watched an abridged version of the 2007 British film Atonement, starring Keira Knightley and James McAvoy. The noted that the film “depicts how a teenaged girl, Briony, accuses her sister’s lover of a rape that he did not commit, which permanently changes the lives of all involved.”
And not, needless to say, for the better.