Hugh Pickens writes "My wife I enjoy watching old movies on a big screen tv in our family room where we can close all the doors and shutter the windows to simulate the ambiance of a theater but there has always been something missing from the experience. Now a report from Science Daily says that scientists have proven that the presence of other people may enhance our movie-watching experiences by influencing one another and gradually synchronizing their emotional responses. This mutual mimicry also affects each participant's evaluation of the overall experience — the more in sync we are with the people around us, the more we like the movie. In a series of experiments, researchers had participants watch a video clip. Some of the participants watched alone, some with other people whose expressions could not be seen due to the presence of a partition, and some with other people whose expressions could be seen. The researchers found that people watching a film together appeared to evaluate the film within the same broad mood and another study found that synchrony of evaluations can be traced to glances at the other person during the film and adoption of the observed expressions. "By mimicking expressions, people catch each other's moods leading to a shared emotional experience. That feels good to people and they attribute that good feeling to the quality of the movie," said one researcher."
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