Scientists at Princeton University have proven that watching movies is beneficial to your mental health as they give you a sense of identity and let people feel their emotions. In this package, I went to Comic Con, a place where people can express themselves through the characters of their favourite movies to demonstrate how movies give us a sense of identity.
“In 2004, Uri Hasson, a professor at Princeton University, coined the term “neurocinematics” to study how the human brain responds to films.” – Emma Reed.
This research proved that watching movies can strengthen relationships in your own life as when you watch the film you can often see how characters in the film react to certain situations and then you can relate this back to your own life to strengthen your own relationships.
Movies can also boost your mood; help you relax and reduce stress. Watching a movie has the potential to enhance your mental wellness, this can be done by watching a movie to suit the mood you are feeling and letting your emotions flow with the movie. Movies can be a huge help to making you feel better, especially for people suffering from anxiety or depression, but of course, watching a movie cannot fix any medical or mental issues you are suffering from as movies are not a treatment for mental health issues but can be a way to help you cope or relax when feeling overwhelmed.
If you are having mental health issues that affect your everyday life seek medical advice from a mental health professional, they can also assess whether cinema therapy aligns with suiting your needs.
Finally, films give people a sense of purpose and identity, as people can relate to characters and even be inspired by characters in movies. The sense of purpose brings people together to the cinema to interact with social circles and have topics to discuss. The sense of purpose brought together with the sense of identity from movies combined starts up successful conventions such as Comic Con for people to come together and show off their favourite movie characters by dressing up in cosplay and being able to purchase merchandise from their favourite movie franchise.
To demonstrate this we came to Comic Con to ask people about their experiences at Comic Con, how many years they have been part of the Comic Con community and tell us a bit about their costumes to show how much movies have impacted their lives.
In this package that we made at Comic Con we were also lucky enough to interview celebrity’s such as Maily Flanagan (the voice of Naruto, and a voice actor for many other animated series), Alannah Masterson (American Actress, stars as Tara in The Walking Dead) and Some of the Cast Members from Father Ted including Ben Keaton and Patrick Mc Donnell.
