The Coupled Brains of Captivated Audiences An Investigation of the Collective Brain Dynamics of an Audience Watching a Suspenseful Film

Abstract

Suspense not only creates a strong psychological tension within individuals, but it does so reliably across viewers who become collectively engaged with the story. Despite its prevalence in media psychology, limited work has examined suspense from a media neuroscience perspective, and thus the biological underpinnings of suspense remain unknown. Here we examine continuous brain responses of 494 viewers watching a suspenseful movie. To create a time-resolved measure of the degree to which a movie aligns audience-wide brain responses, we computed dynamic inter-subject correlations of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) time series among all viewers using sliding-window analysis. In parallel, we captured in-The-moment reports of suspense in an independent sample via continuous response measurement (CRM). We found that dynamic inter-subject correlations over the course of the movie tracked well with the reported suspense in the CRM sample, particularly in regions associated with emotional salience and higher cognitive processes. These results are compatible with theoretical views on motivated attention and psychological tension. The finding that fMRI-based audience response measurement relates to audience reports of suspense creates new opportunities for research on the mechanisms of suspense and other entertainment phenomena and has applied potential for measuring audience responses in a nonreactive and objective fashion.