Students recorded how each clip made their moods shift according to the seven feelings mentioned above, giving the researchers raw data on the relative emotional power of each film on their list. After years of narrowing down a list of films suggested by colleagues, film critics, video store employees and the like, Levenson and Gross put 76 clips before an audience of 500 male and female students in 1995. So in 1988, Gross and Levenson set out to find the be-all-end-all of emotion-altering films across seven categories: Amusement, anger, contentment, disgust, fear, sadness, and surprise.Īs anyone who has ever debated movie merits with friends will understand, these are not question easily answered. But before we get into that, you may wonder how (and why) science weighed in on this.īehavior researchers need to be able to manipulate their subjects’ emotions for a lot of reasons. It’s called The Champ (1979), and it is heartrending. There is, in fact, a scientifically verified saddest movie of all time.

There is no wrong answer defining our own emotional extremes is one of those uniquely human impulses, like playing air guitar, that we must all experience but in our own special way.īut according to science-specifically, University of California, Berkeley researchers Robert Levenson and James Gross-that doesn’t mean there isn’t a right answer to these questions. What’s the funniest movie of all time? How about the scariest movie? The saddest? You probably have your own set of answers to all of these questions, forged over years of debate with friends and first dates, tempered in bottomless cups of coffee and wine.

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