How the Entertaining Effects of Movies Help People to Reduce Chronic Stress and Increase Happiness

Abstract

With the increasing stress from work and study that people face today, easy-to-access entertainment to release chronic stress and increase happiness would arouse more popularity. As a traditional entertainment industry, Movie is easy to access by going to the cinema or watching online, which has become an increasingly globalized business. The present research was on how the entertaining effects of movies are associated with psychological well-being. It provides a study on three film types, comedies, tearjerkers, and thrilling movies. Comic movies are usually welcome, which bring people happiness by funny plots. Moreover, many scientific experiments made before verified that people will unconsciously mimic the facial expressions of characters in comedies, which turns out to affect the experience of the same emotion of happiness through the integration between the body and brain. Tearjerkers may bring people tears. However, an experiment made by Gracˇanin, Vingerhoets, Kardum, Šantek,& Šimic´ (2015), provided evidence that after the initial deterioration of mood following crying, it takes some time for the mood, not just to recover, but also to become even less negative than before the emotional event. Per Sapolsky, R.M, scary and thrilling movies generate moderate glucocorticoid elevation, which turns out to trigger the release of dopamine from pleasure pathways and gain a sense of anticipatory pleasure. Besides the above mentioned, there are also general benefits of movies, such as social connections, a distraction from worries, and increased flow. All of those make movies good activities to reduce chronic stress and increase happiness.