An Investigation of the Relationship Between Violence and Emotion Perception: Evidence from Turkish Cinema

Abstract

Violence has been a significant phenomenon throughout human history and has been studied across various disciplines. With the rise of interdisciplinary approaches, it has become a central issue in many fields. Adapting a psycholinguistic perspective, this study examines how films with violent content influence people's perception of emotions. It was hypothesized that the violent content in film the participants saw would alter their perception of the emotional content of the words they were shown. To this end, they performed a rating task on a list of positive, negative, and neutral words before and after watching a violent film. A comparison of pre- and post-ratings revealed that valence ratings decreased for all word types after watching the film, while arousal ratings remained unchanged. These findings suggest that exposure to violent content can influence how emotional words are perceived. The results provide valuable insights into the impact of violence on emotional processing.