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How watching Avatar the Movie Elicits Feelings of Awe in the Audience of Reddit Users

Lütke-Bohmert, H. (2024) How watching Avatar the Movie Elicits Feelings of Awe in the Audience of Reddit Users.

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Abstract:Advancing climate change has led to the use of environmental movies to promote awareness. With streaming and social media platforms like Netflix and TikTok, visual storytelling effectively connects individuals with nature and fosters pro-environmental attitudes. Environmental films use awe, an emotion that enhances appreciation for the environment, to create meaningful media experiences. This study examines awe in audience reactions to Avatar 2 on Reddit, using text mining to analyze qualitative data. The goal is to understand how awe promotes environmental awareness. Focusing on Reddit's "Avatar" subreddit with terms “Avatar WoW2” and “Awe,” an exploratory mixed-methods approach was employed. Text mining through Orange and qualitative content analysis identified physical, social, and cognitive elicitors of awe from 726 audience responses using LDA topic modelling. Central features of awe, such as vastness and accommodation, and peripheral features like beauty, threat, ability, supernatural causes, and virtue, were emphasized by the audience. The study concludes that Avatar 2 exemplifies how environmental films use awe to create meaningful experiences and raise environmental awareness. Future research should involve multiple researchers for reliability, compare awe elicitors between Avatar movies, and expand analysis to other sources like interviews or questionnaires.
Item Type:Essay (Master)
Faculty:BMS: Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences
Subject:77 psychology
Programme:Psychology MSc (66604)
Link to this item:https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/102092
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