In Cinema, chemical composition of audiences breathe varies during specific movie scenes
A study in Germany lead by Jonathan Williams measured the air composition during movies screening. They tested different genres of movies, Suspense, Comedy, Romantic comedy, Mystery, Romance and Drama, including The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, Belle and Sebastian and Carrie.
During 6 weeks between 2013 and 2014, Williams and colleages collected air samples and analysed them using Mass-Spectroscopy. Then they tried to find association between air composition and movies scenes.
“The chemical signature of The Hunger Games was very clear; even when we repeated the measurements with different audiences,” Indeed, two significant peaks of CO2 were measure when the heroine fought for her life. A suggested explanation is that the viewers are more tense and breathe faster.
This original study may bring answer to medical fields. The field of medicinal breathe analysis could use these data to estimate the emotion state of patients.
Even more in entertainment industries, could one influence people emotional state using air chemical composition ?
I contacted Jonathan Williams to ask him questions. He nicely answered. Please find below his answers to my 2 questions:
1) Did you use the cinema set up in order to show that breathe chemical composition depends one’s emotion, specially « suspense » and « comedy » ?
"Yes that's right, we asked ourselves the question, do the chemicals we breathe out in any way reflect our emotional state? The idea came when we were measuring the air at a football match with the aim of getting an average breath spectrum from 30 000 people. Although we did get the average breath spectrum, the game ended goaless and so we could not characterize chemically what happens when a goal is scored. So we thought, where can we really investigate this questions under controlled conditions. The answer was, in a cinema. A cinema is simply people in a ventilated box and if you show the people films to make them laugh or scare them any changes in the air composition they induce will be detectable where the air is vented to outside."
2) I noticed that you performed the experiment around Christmas and New year’s (26th to 30th). People in Germany are quite emotionally affected by all the festivities. Do you thing it could have influenced your data ?
"What a good question, I did not think of that before. The reason for working at Christmas is because in summer we investigate photochemistry (most active when the sun and emissions from plants is strongest). In the winter we tend not to measure and the instruments remain in the lab over Christmas holiday. However, for cinemas, Christmas is the best time to measure. This is when most new films come out and most people go the cinema. In this way the work fits nicely together with our main job, which is to investigate atmospheric chemistry.
My feeling is that when we watch films, we lose ourselves in the emotion of the film, independent of when we go and see it, so I would guess that this would not be a factor. However, it is an intriguing idea and worth thinking about, thanks for the question."
I contacted Jonathan Williams to ask him questions. He nicely answered. Please find below his answers to my 2 questions:
1) Did you use the cinema set up in order to show that breathe chemical composition depends one’s emotion, specially « suspense » and « comedy » ?
"Yes that's right, we asked ourselves the question, do the chemicals we breathe out in any way reflect our emotional state? The idea came when we were measuring the air at a football match with the aim of getting an average breath spectrum from 30 000 people. Although we did get the average breath spectrum, the game ended goaless and so we could not characterize chemically what happens when a goal is scored. So we thought, where can we really investigate this questions under controlled conditions. The answer was, in a cinema. A cinema is simply people in a ventilated box and if you show the people films to make them laugh or scare them any changes in the air composition they induce will be detectable where the air is vented to outside."
2) I noticed that you performed the experiment around Christmas and New year’s (26th to 30th). People in Germany are quite emotionally affected by all the festivities. Do you thing it could have influenced your data ?
"What a good question, I did not think of that before. The reason for working at Christmas is because in summer we investigate photochemistry (most active when the sun and emissions from plants is strongest). In the winter we tend not to measure and the instruments remain in the lab over Christmas holiday. However, for cinemas, Christmas is the best time to measure. This is when most new films come out and most people go the cinema. In this way the work fits nicely together with our main job, which is to investigate atmospheric chemistry.
My feeling is that when we watch films, we lose ourselves in the emotion of the film, independent of when we go and see it, so I would guess that this would not be a factor. However, it is an intriguing idea and worth thinking about, thanks for the question."
We can always learn :)
Sources:
- Williams, J. et al. Cinema audiences reproducibly vary the chemical composition of air during films, by broadcasting scene specific emissions on breath. Sci. Rep. 6, 25464; doi: 10.1038/srep25464 (2016).
- http://www.mpic.de/en/news/press-information/news/spannung-in-der-kinoluft.html
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