Mediating Emotion: Technology, Social Science, and Emotion in the Payne Fund Motion-Picture Studies

摘要

A headline from a 1933 article in the New York Times reporting on the Payne Fund studies went to the heart of the period's anxieties about film and emotion: "OVEREXCITEMENT IS SEEN." Caught up in a culture of emotional control, the Payne Fund motion-picture studies-and Dysinger and Ruckmick's work in particular-had sought to ferret out the emotional excesses of mass culture. Dysinger and Ruckmick had also taken aim at the excessive emotions of social science itself, pushing for the more quantitative, impersonal research that had taken hold in the early twentieth century.