Sad films are natural painkillers

Traumatic films may boost pain tolerance and feelings of group bonding by increasing levels of feel-good chemicals produced by the brain, study reveals.

Tyrannosaur, Breaking the Waves and Schindler’s List might make you reach for the tissues, but psychologists say they have found a reason why traumatic films are so appealing.

Researchers at Oxford University say that watching traumatic films boosts feelings of group bonding, as well as increasing pain tolerance by upping levels of feel-good, pain-killing chemicals produced in the brain.

“The argument here is that actually, maybe the emotional wringing you get from tragedy triggers the endorphin system,” said Robin Dunbar, a co-author of the study and professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Oxford.

Previous research has found that laughing together, dancing together and working in a team can increase social bonding and heighten pain tolerance through an endorphin boost. “All of those things, including singing and dancing and jogging and laughter, all produce an endorphin kick for the same reason – they are putting the musculature of the body under stress,” said Dunbar.

Being harrowed, he adds, could have a similar effect. “It has turned out that the same areas in the brain that deal with physical pain also handle psychological pain,” said Dunbar.

Who doesn’t love a weepy movie?

You know the kind of thing – those poor cowboys from Brokeback Mountain not being allowed to ride together, the opening bit from Up that chokes you up before the film’s even started, and Leonardo DiCaprio freezing his arse off after copping an iceberg.

Well, according to science, those sad movies might actually be good for you.

An Oxford University team – comprising of both arts and science boffins – has conducted groundbreaking experiments that suggest emotional and dramatic films trigger endorphins, a natural feel-good painkiller.

As reported by the BBC, Oxford evolutionary psychology professor Robin Dunbar said, “Fiction is widely studied by humanities academics as it is an important feature of human society, common to all cultures.

“Yet the reasons why fiction can be so engrossing and the functions for this have not been widely studied by psychologists or behavioural biologists.

“There are good social reasons – folklore enables us to pass on wisdom or ingrain community values, bringing us together. While that is important, it does not fully explain why we are willing to return again and again to be entertained.”

The experiments showed films to two groups of volunteers – one group watching a story about the troubled life of a homeless man, while the other watched a film about a neutral subject.

Their pain threshold was tested by using the “wall-sit” method, where subjects have to rest their back against in the sitting position and see how long they can hold it.

“Those who had the greatest emotional response also had the greatest increase in pain threshold and the greater their sense of being bonded with their group,” said Professor Dunbar.

While further research is needed to look at a wider range of films and other influences, such as musical scores, Dunbar says the results suggest that watching traumatic films increases endorphin levels in the brain, boosting pain tolerance and increasing the sense of bonding with others in the group.

Prof Sophie Scott, group leader of the speech communication neuroscience group at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, said it was striking that traumatic films, like laughter, appear to produce a social bonding effect.

“It suggests that it not simply [with] positive emotions that you have this bonding effect – maybe there is something about a shared emotional experience which is really changing how your endorphins are being taken up and making you feel closer to people,” she said, adding that exploring the effects of anger or disgust could help to tease apart whether the effect was down to particular emotions, or rather the sharing of them.

But Scott, who wasn’t involved in the research, said she isn’t convinced that Dunbar and colleagues have discovered the foundations of our love of storytelling. “Stories are everything for humans – if we can fit something into a story we will do. We understand things better if they fit to stories, we remember things better if they fit to stories,” she said. “I don’t know if you are going account for that simply with shared emotions.”

Who doesn’t love a weepy movie?

The results reveal that those who watched the traumatic film had, on average, a strong negative change to their mood, while those who watched the documentaries showed only a slight change in both positive and negative markers, which the researchers attribute to boredom.

They also found that, on average, the pain tolerance of those who watched the traumatic movie increased by 13.1%, whereas those who watched the documentaries experienced a decrease in pain threshold of 4.6%. The upshot is that the traumatic film boosted pain thresholds by nearly 18% compared to the “control” scenario. What’s more, those who showed an increase in pain tolerance also had increased feelings of group bonding, despite their mood becoming less positive.

But not everyone showed an emotional response to Stuart: A life backwards. Some viewers showed a decrease in pain threshold, together with no change in their social bonding.

“This is probably true of everyday life – some people get very moved emotionally by some event that happens

While the team suspects that other psychological aspects also play a role, the release of endorphins explains a lot about how our love of emotional fiction has evolved as a social phenomenon.

So, don’t worry about looking all un-manly – having a good old cry over a film could be doing you the world of good.

Now where’s that Titanic DVD?