The present study has a cognitive approach to empathy and character engagement in cinema. In discussing how through empathy and engagement with real and fictional characters, we extend our minds and enhance our cognitive abilities, the present paper studies Bahram Tavakkoli’s Wandering in the Fog (2010), to show how Andy Clark and David Chalmers’s idea of the extended mind as joined with ...

Cinema is at once a powerful medium, art, entertain­ ment, an industry and an instrument of social change; psychiatrists should neither ignore nor censor it. Representations of psychiatrists are mixed but psychiatric treatments are rarely portrayed posi tively. In this article, five rules of movie psychiatry are proposed, supported by over 370 films. Commercial and artistic pressures reduce ver...

The present research focuses on the development of a fear detection system for surveillance applications based on acoustic cues. The emotional speech material used for this study comes from the previously collected SAFE Database (Situation Analysis in a Fictional and Emotional Database) which consists of audiovisual sequences extracted from movie fictions. We address here the question of a spec...

ctor Tom Cruise is a cool guy. In Minority Report, he shines as a hard-boiled fighter against evil. He is cast as a policeman in the year 2054 – and as you would expect from science fiction, he is surrounded by a huge amount of high tech. But looking at the movie today, only 14 years after its premiere, there are parts of the vision of the future that don’t look very advanced. In a scene that s...

Audiovisual material accompanied by interlingual subtitles is a powerful pedagogical tool which can help improve the vocabulary learning of second-language learners. This study was intended to determine whether or not the mode (standard and reversed) of subtitling affects the incidental vocabulary acquisition of Iranian L2 learners while watching TV programs. Forty-five participants were random...

If a baby starts to cry several hours after drinking his last bottle, his mother knows precisely what he's feeling: He's hungry. But suppose a woman's eyes brim with tears while she watches a DVD. Her husband sinks into the couch: What is she so upset about? She might tell him directly: "This movie is so tragic. It's all about a doomed romance." That may be true. But she could be thinking about...