The still above is from the tearjerker ending of the 1979 film The Champ, starring Ricky (RICK, damnit!) Schroeder. It's apparently a "go to" clip in psychology experiments to study emotional triggers and depression. It became the industry standard after 1988 when UC Berkeley psych professor Robert Levenson and then-grad student James Gross launched what became a multi-year effort to identify film clips that were exceptionally useful at eliciting single emotions from viewers. From Smithsonian:
"In the old days, we used to be able to induce fear by giving people electric shocks," Levenson says.
Ethical concerns now put more constraints on how scientists can elicit negative emotions. Sadness is especially difficult. How do you induce a feeling of loss or failure in the laboratory without resorting to deception or making a test subject feel miserable?
"You can't tell them something horrible has happened to their family, or tell them they have some terrible disease," says William Frey II, a University of Minnesota neuroscientist who has studied the composition of tears.
But as Gross says, "films have this really unusual status." People willingly pay money to see tearjerkers—and walk out of the theater with no apparent ill effect. As a result, "there's an ethical exemption" to making someone emotional with a film, Gross says.
In 1995, Gross and Levenson published the results of their test screenings. They came up with a list of 16 short film clips able to elicit a single emotion, such as anger, fear or surprise. Their recommendation for inducing disgust was a short film showing an amputation. Their top-rated film clip for amusement was the fake orgasm scene from When Harry Met Sally. And then there's the two-minute, 51-second clip of Schroder weeping over his father's dead body in The Champ, which Levenson and Gross found produced more sadness in laboratory subjects than the death of Bambi's mom.
"The Saddest Movie in the World"
