With the popularity of media rising we see there is a problem with emotions being accurately portrayed in the media. Despite the need for humans to be able to emotionally connect, scenes are being overly dramatized and if continued this may cause an impact on mental illness and emotional acceptance towards rising generations. Surprise is an overly dramatized emotion in film as people often react or “jump” when surprised in movies.  The amygdala is a necessary part of the brain that reacts to surprising or scary scenes and instructs your body on how to respond to unexpected or frightening events. This affects your brain, heart, lungs, and hormones. (Brownlowe, 2023) Surprising events affect your whole body and it's important to understand what causes your emotions. The American Psychological Association addresses the effect of dramatized emotion on mental health by stating, “Overall, all types of news media consumption increased emotional distress, but television and social media exposure were more strongly associated”(Huff, 2022). This problem negatively impacts rising generations as their mental health, as well as daily interaction with others is being affected by dramatized portrayal of emotion. A possible cause of this problem is a lack of knowledge of what causes audiences of movies to have an emotional connection as well as an emotional response. A study focusing on specific emotions to discover what causes an emotional response will help impact accurate connections and emotions being portrayed in the film industry.

Emotion is an important part of everything we do, and how we react to what we see and hear can impact our every day lives. My study will help to discover the importance of hearing as well as seeing and the reaction that causes us in terms of surprise. The significance of this study as it furthers the understanding of emotional response and the impact the rise of media has on daily encounters. This research is significant as it can aim to bridge sound and sight as senses to a similar purpose.

  This research is significant as the findings show evidence for a new understanding of human emotion. This research leads to an understanding of emotion and may lead to further accurate emotional portrayals in films. This research, if continued, would allow for sound to be more prominent in films and therefore could create stronger emotional pulls.

   I decided to use exploratory research in the form of surveys to explore sound and sight effects on surprise. I had participants watch and listen to scenes from four movies (Legally Blonde, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, Five Feet Apart, and Meet Joe Black) and share their emotional responses with both audio and visual excerpts for each movie. Each movie was meant to showcase a different type of surprise such as sadness and fear. I then compared these survey results to discover a trend using a quantitative correlational approach to explore this. A quantitative approach was used to take a statistical lens to see the difference between the effects of sound and sight. I used a correlational approach as I then compared these results to emotion. This correlational approach was necessary to find the correlation between sound and emotion as well as sight and emotion. I investigated the everyday experience of human's response to media while connecting it to the everyday feeling and emotion of surprise.  A quantitative correlation approach was a necessity to be able to understand my results and to find a correlation.