The shape of inspiration: exploring the emotional arcs and self-transcendent elicitors within inspirational movies

Emotions have long been regarded as a central component of the entertainment media experience. The present study combines computational analysis and quantitative content analysis to analyze the emotional arcs of inspirational media content and associated elicitors of self-transcendent emotions in order to develop a more comprehensive understanding of inspirational media. Results demonstrate that inspirational movies can be characterized by a positive shift in sentiment at the end of the narrative and multiple shifts between relatively negative and relatively positive sentiment throughout the story. Furthermore, the “peaks” and “valleys” in the emotional arcs are associated with the presence of differing inspirational elicitors, and the presence of certain elicitors (such as kindness/moral goodness) within a scene predicted positive shifts in the emotional arcs in the scenes following the elicitor.