Earned your weekly cinema tickets? Good news: Cinema is good for you!
One of the most popular rewards that our healthy customers utilise is the free weekly cinema tickets. There are obvious reason’s for the popularity. Treating their partners, families and friends to weekly cinema trips. Saving money on what is normally quite an expensive activity. Getting to see the latest films.
Aside from the more obvious reasons, some studies have shown that attending the cinema can actually make you happier, and improve your mental wellbeing.
A Paper presented at this years ESOMAR, a research and marketing congress in Dublin, found that people are have higher happiness levels when attending the cinema than with other channels of media consumption.
The report showed that people vividly recalled many small details and emotions from their cinema experience. People were more passive or forgetful when consuming other media. The study showed that cinema tapped into two ‘happiness drivers’, Focus and Relationships, and doing so in a powerful way.
“Cinema offers consumers a rare opportunity to focus on one thing without distractions and it is usually attended with someone else, making it talkable and enhancing memory.”
Other research, by Noah Uhrig of the Institute for Social and Economic Research, entitled ‘Cinema is Good for you,’ found that the unique properties of attending the cinema can have real positive effects on a persons mental wellbeing. The visual stimulation can result in a range of emotions and the collective experience of these emotions through the cinema can provide a safe environment in which to experience emotions and thoughts that people may not normally feel free to convey.
Uhrig writes;
“The collective nature of the narrative and visual stimulation makes the experience enjoyable and controlled, thereby offering benefits beyond mere visual stimulation. Moreover, the cinema is unique in that it is a highly accessible social art form, the participation in which generally cuts across economic lines. At the same time, attending the cinema allows for the exercise of personal preferences and the human need for distinction.
In a nutshell, cinema attendance can be both a personally expressive experience, good fun, and therapeutic at the same time.”
An article on featured on Greatist, which discusses why people love sad films so much, had similar findings. People seem to love paying money to watch sad or tragic films. But why?
“A lot goes on in our brains when we watch sad, emotional, or tragic films, and what’s surprising is that a lot of this brain activity actually promotes feelings of happiness, closeness in our relationships, and a sense of community.”
The research by Paul Zak, of the Centre for Neuro-economic Studies, showed that the brain releases oxytocin when watching sad films. Oxytocin engages with brain circuits to promote feelings of empathy with others.
“We may be drawn to sad movies because we tend to feel happier after watching them. These good feelings may result from feeling grateful for the circumstances in our lives or from feeling connected to other people”
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