How the object of affect guides its impact

an interesting experiment in film editing. He showed the face of a well known actor followed by the image of a bowl of soup, a child with a teddy bear, or a woman in a coffin. Although the actor’s expression remained constant, audiences reportedly experienced him as hungry, happy, or sad, depending on the image that followed his face. Kuleshov concluded that the emo-tional impact of film on audiences depends on how it is edited, a watershed observation in the history of film. In this article, we argue that the impact of our own emotional experiences also depends on how we do the editing. Emotions are reactions to the perceived significance of events, and they occur more or less immediately upon that perception. Thus, underlying both the power of film and of everyday emotions is the Affective Immediacy Principle, which is that affective reactions are always experienced as being about whatever is in mind at th