Watching films that reduce you to tears may increase your threshold for pain and boost feel-good chemicals in the brain, Oxford scientists have found. They also found that stories that arouse our emotions trigger the same mechanisms as other forms of bonding.
While comedy makes us laugh, a process that releases endorphins - feel-good chemicals that increase pain tolerance and lead us to bond with each other, it is less clear why we would choose to watch emotionally stirring drama.
Researchers from Oxford University in the UK decided to test whether such drama causes emotional arousal that itself triggers endorphin release. For the study, a group of volunteers watched the film ‘Stuart: A life Backwards’, chronicling the life story of a disabled child abuse survivor who eventually kills himself. A second group watched documentaries that were about far less emotive subjects.
As it is impossible to directly measure endorphin release without scanning or a lumbar puncture, neither of which are generally practical, the team tested changes in pain threshold, a common proxy measure for endorphin release.