What Your Favorite Movie Genre Reveals About Your Brain

A recent study links film preferences to emotional responsiveness.

Reviewed by Lybi Ma

Key points

• Researchers scanned the brains of 257 people while showing them pictures of angry or fearful faces.
• The brains of action and comedy fans responded more strongly to these depictions of negative emotion.
• The brains of documentary and thriller fans responded less strongly.
• The study's lead researcher believes people prefer the film genres that optimally stimulate their brains.

When you settle in for a night of Netflix, which category do you browse first? Are you drawn to the adrenaline rush of an action flick? The suspense of a crime thriller? Or the intellectual stimulation of a documentary?

According to a recent study published in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, your choice of genre is linked to how your brain processes emotions.

“Films are so fascinating because they not only depict every human emotion, but they also evoke them. Negative emotions, such as anger or fear, play a central role in many films,” says Esther Zwiky, the study’s lead author and a doctoral student in psychology at Germany’s Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg.

Zwiky and her research team asked 257 people about their favorite film genre before scanning their brains using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine. Such imaging shows blood flow changes in the brain, allowing radiologists to track which brain regions are the most active.

During the scan, participants were shown faces expressing anger or fear. Meanwhile, researchers monitored two regions of their brains: the amygdala, responsible for processing emotion, and the nucleus accumbens, the brain’s reward center.

What they saw was a striking contrast in brain activity between fans of different film genres.

Action fans had the strongest responses in both brain regions. Not only were they highly stimulated by seeing negative emotions (as shown by amygdala activity), but that stimulation also felt rewarding to them (as shown by nucleus accumbens activity).

“We hadn’t expected this, as action films typically provide many stimuli,” says Zwiky. “Thus, it would have made more sense if action fans had been less easy to stimulate.”

The results were similar for fans of comedy. Those who preferred thrillers and documentaries, on the other hand, reacted much less strongly to seeing negative emotions on screen.

Why do these genres attract audiences with such distinct brain activity?

Comedies and documentaries are about as different from each other as film genres can get, but what about action movies and thrillers? Both put their characters through negative emotions like fear and anger. Both depict acts of violence, dangerous adversaries, and risky situations. Both also rely heavily on tension and suspense to keep viewers on the edge of their seats.

What matters seems to be why each genre portrays negative emotions.

In an action movie, the hero’s feelings of fear, stress, rage, and (eventually) relief or joy are the point, and people whose brains respond strongly to on-screen emotions may get more vicarious thrills out of the cinematic experience.

Although fear and stress are important in thrillers, too, those films tend to focus on intrigue, leading the viewer through a tangled plot to a surprising conclusion. The cognitive stimulation of the mystery is probably what interests less emotionally responsive viewers.

Similarly, comedies emphasize feelings while documentaries appeal to our intellect.

The research doesn’t explain whether differences in the brain’s responsiveness to negative emotions are innate or acquired. A person’s neural wiring may influence which movies they’re attracted to, or watching certain types of movies may shape the brain’s responses.

Whatever the cause of these neurological differences, they raise questions about the underpinnings of personal taste. Why do we like what we like?

According to Zwiky, “It appears that people choose the film genres that most optimally stimulate their brains.”