Cognition, Emotion, and Aesthetics in Contemporary Serial Television

Ted Nannicelli, Héctor J. Pérez, Ted Nannicelli, Héctor J. Pérez

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000478815
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Fernsehgeschichte & -kritik

This book posits an interconnection between the ways in which contemporary television serials cue cognitive operations, solicit emotional responses, and elicit aesthetic appreciation.

The chapters explore a number of questions including: How do the particularities of form and style in contemporary serial television engage us cognitively, emotionally, and aesthetically? How do they foster cognitive and emotional effects such as feeling suspense, anticipation, surprise, satisfaction, and disappointment? Why and how do we value some serials while disliking others? What is it about the particularities of serial television form and style, in conjunction with our common cognitive, emotional, and aesthetic capacities, that accounts for serial television's cognitive, socio-political, and aesthetic value and its current ubiquity in popular culture?

This book will appeal to postgraduates and scholars working in television studies as well as film studies, cognitive media theory, media psychology, and the philosophy of art.

1 Introduction

Cognition, emotion, and aesthetics in contemporary serial television

Ted Nannicelli and Héctor J. Pérez

DOI: 10.4324/9781003188643-1

On May 19, 2019, nearly 20 million people around the world stopped what they were doing, temporarily ignoring deadlines, stresses, or whatever else might have been preoccupying them, and, despite differences in age, gender, race, class, political affiliation, nationality, and religion, were temporarily united by a common interest: How would Game of Thrones end? It is easy to forget, in our contemporary moment of narrowcasting and individualized media “curation,” the extent to which television is nevertheless capable of eliciting widely shared cognitive, emotional, and aesthetic responses from a broad spectrum of viewers. This book’s overarching goal is to explore how this happens.

Our book’s title, Contemporary Serial Television: Cognition, Emotion, and Aesthetics, posits an interconnection between the ways in which contemporary television serials cue cognitive operations, solicit emotional responses, and elicit aesthetic appreciation. By “cognitive operations,” we mean activities such as remembering and ordering some narrative events and anticipating or inferring the occurrence of others. By emotional responses, we have in mind both general, fiction-directed moods such as dread or anxiety, and more narrowly focused emotions such as suspense or fear, sometimes with a more specifically directed object – such as anger at a character. And by aesthetic appreciation, in this context, we roughly mean experiences that, in virtue of the close attention to an object’s formal elements and their interrelations, are special or valuable in their own right, including, for example, the apprehension of beauty, balance, unity, elegance, and the like, as well as the more general feelings of wonder, awe, fascination, and admiration that are engendered by such apprehension. Aesthetic appreciation thus contains a cognitive element as well as a sensory or perceptual aspect and an affective dimension.

These foci – cognition, emotion, and aesthetic appreciation – are not typical of most contemporary scholarship on television. Why not? The long answer is complicated; the short answer is simply that television studies developed in such a way that its key theoretical concerns lie elsewhere. To see this, one need only look at some of the recent textbooks that survey the field. For example, Jonathan Bignell writes that his An Introduction to Television Studies “is concerned with the most commonly studied theoretical issues in television courses,” which include “analytical study of television programmes as texts,” “the television industry as an institution and its production practices and organization,” “television in contemporary culture and the sociological study of audiences,” and “television history and developments in broadcasting policy” (2013, 2). And in a chapter titled “Introduction to Television Studies” in Television: Visual Storytelling and Screen Culture, Jeremy Butler claims that “the most significant … strains of television studies” are

approaches that focus mostly on TV programs “themselves,” without theorizing extensively about the TV viewer or the TV industry (authorship, stylistics, genre study, and semiotics) … and approaches that examine how TV’s meanings, its discourses, are received by viewers and produced by TV-industry workers (ideological analysis, political economy, feminism, queer theory, and race and ethnic studies).

(2018, 311)

Notably absent from these lists is a consideration of television programs as artworks. By using the term “artwork,” we do not mean to bestow any special honor or value on television. Rather, we are talking about “art” in a descriptive, classificatory sense that picks out a cluster of artifacts, performances, and the practices of creating them. Artworks, like other artifacts, are designed with particular aims and purposes. The aims and purposes of narrative artworks, including narrative television programs, typically include the enjoyable or otherwise rewarding cognitive and emotional engagement of the readers or viewers. Furthermore, what we might call popular artworks, or “mass artworks,” to use Noël Carroll’s more precise term, are designed to be “accessible virtually on contact, without specialized background training and/or effort by vast numbers of people” (1998, 196). While mainstream television studies tends to emphasize “polysemy” and the diversity of viewing perspectives, it seems to us that one of the most interesting features of contemporary serial television is its ability to elicit intended effects – ranging from misdirection and surprise to the feeling of sympathy to aesthetic pleasure – from mass audiences.

We think that the nature of the phenomenon under investigation ought to determine the research methods to be employed. Accordingly, this volume assembles contributors from a variety of fields and disciplines whose approaches are suitable for the task of exploring contemporary serial television’s ability to foster congruent cognitive, emotional, and aesthetic experiences of screen stories. By “congruent,” we do not mean “universal” but “widely shared” or “common.” The fact that contemporary serial television is able to elicit such widely shared responses among mass audiences is important because it allows us to think about our research problem in a slightly different way: It means that contemporary serial television is able to appeal to something(s) that is/are shared by large numbers of viewers who might otherwise be extremely heterogeneous. In Carroll’s words, mass artworks like serialized television “aim at engaging what is common among huge populations” (1998, 196).

The research approaches adopted in this book – media psychology, cognitive media theory, and television aesthetics – take this observation as a starting point. As Carroll wrote in an early and influential argument for a cognitive approach to theorizing the power of movies to engage mass audiences,

only by focusing on cognitive capacities, especially ones as deeply embedded as pictorial recognition, practical reason, and the drive to get answers to our questions, will we be in the best position to find the features of movies that account for their phenomenally widespread effectiveness; since cognitive capacities … seem the most plausible candidate for what mass-movie audiences have in common. That is, the question of the power of movies involves explaining how peoples of different cultures, societies, nations, races, creeds, educational backgrounds, age groups, and sexes can find movies easily accessible and gripping.

(1996, 92)

For all three approaches featured in the present volume – media psychology, cognitive media theory, and television aesthetics – the foundational assumption from which we need to begin to explain widely shared cognitive, emotional, and aesthetic responses to serial television is that despite whatever differences exist between individual viewers and collective audiences, those responses depend upon our evolved cognitive capacities.

In the pages that follow, we try to illuminate further relevant connections between these three research approaches. Some of these links are historical, so we spend a bit of time developing a historical narrative that aims to bring forth commonalities in the intellectual histories of these research traditions. Other connections are conceptual, involving shared research questions, aims, and methodological assumptions. Our overall ambition in this book is to foster closer collaboration between researchers across these three traditions working on similar questions and problems; our overall goal in the rest of the Introduction is to demonstrate that these three research traditions already have more in common than might be apparent at first sight and with regard to the study of television, are pursuing similar questions pitched at varying, potentially complementary levels of specificity.

Media psychology

The first of these approaches represented here – media psychology – might be thought of as a road not taken by television studies. According to Karen Dill-Shackleford’s definition in the introduction to The Oxford Companion to Media Psychology, “media psychology is the scientific study of human behavior, thoughts, and feelings experienced in the context of media use and creation” (2013, 6). Although the formal establishment of the field might be traced to the American Psychological Association’s 1987 establishment of a dedicated division (46) to the topic, media psychology is widely regarded as an “emerging field” (Dill 2013, 4; Rutledge 2013, 44): a journal and a textbook bearing the title Media Psychology first appeared in 1999 and 2003, respectively (Giles 2003). As we shall soon see, recent work in this interdisciplinary field has increasingly intersected with research being conducted under the banner of cognitive film theory or cognitive media theory. But before we get to this, let us provide some historical and intellectual context to explain this exchange and media psychology’s relative lack of exchange with television studies.

Media psychology’s roots lie in the disciplines of mass communications and psychology, especially social psychology. The reason we claim that media psychology might be thought of as a road not taken for television studies is that mass communications was also central to the development of the scholarly study of television before other research traditions like literary studies, sociology, and cultural studies gained more prominence as television studies came into its own as a field (Allen 1992, 13–16; Butler 2018, 371–377; Gray and Lotz 2019, 14–15; Spigel 2009, 150). Mass communications’ own development as a field is ineluctably tied to World War II, both because of the influx of German and Austrian emigres like Paul Lazarsfeld and Kurt Lewin, whose work would come to shape the discipline, and because of the ways in which the American government’s interest in propaganda and communication fostered a number of well-resourced research projects in these areas.

It is important to understand that mass communications emerged in concert with contemporary American social psychology, which had a particularly cognitive inflection in the time immediately preceding and throughout World War II in the United States thanks, also, to the European intellectual migration. As Robert M. Farr writes in his historical study The Roots of Modern Social Psychology, “social psychologists in America were cognitive theorists at a time when it was not fashionable to be so, i.e., in the heyday of behaviourism” (1996, 7). Moreover, he explains, “This was mainly due to the influence of the Gestalt psychologists” (Farr 1996, 7). By the time John B. Watson’s classic Behaviorism was published in a revised version in 1930 (the original having been published in 1925), the behaviorist paradigm was ensconced in the psychology departments of the major U.S. universities (Mandler and Mandler 1969, 376).

It was in this intellectual context that the founders of Gestalt psychology arrived in the United States from their institutional home at the Berlin School of Experimental Psychology – Kurt Koffka in 1927, Max Wertheimer in 1933, and Wolfgang Kohler in 1935. Less central to the establishment of the Gestalt movement, but also working in the Berlin School before emigrating to the United States, were Hans Wallach and Kurt Lewin. Wallach was employed by Kohler – who had taught him in Berlin – at Swarthmore College, where he taught a number of students who went on to be major figures in the establishment of cognitive psychology and perceptual psychology, including Ulric Neisser, Irvin Rock, and Julian Hochberg. Hochberg’s research on the perception of motion images eventually came to influence the development of cognitive film theory, as did the work of Rudolf Arnheim, who studied under Kohler and Wertheimer before emigrating.

At this rich confluence of Gestalt psychology, or the psychology of perception more broadly, social psychology, and cognitive psychology, Regina M. Tuma finds a plausible candidate for an early and important work of media psychology which has a connection to motion pictures that is somewhat ironic given the failure of the promising interdisciplinary methodology to take hold in film and television studies until decades later. The research in question is Hadley Cantril’s The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic, published in 1940, which investigates Orson Welles’s infamous radio adaptation of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds. Aspects of Cantril’s study have been criticized by contemporary media historians, but the important methodological point isn’t about Cantril’s data collection or experiment design, which a...