ABSTRACT
To feel more alive, many people seek out experiences that evoke high-intensity emotions-riding a roller coaster, sky diving, watching a scary movie, watching or playing the agony and ecstasy of competitive sports, attending the celebration of a music festival, or the release of laughter found with a stand-up comic. (Of course, there are also many people who avoid such experiences if at all possible.) We also turn to the arts to express aspects of the less outwardly obvious but more profound aspects of human experience-the stirrings in our hearts and souls. Emotions are the source of most creative work: poems speak of love and loss, pain and pleasure, as do songs, dances, and stories told through novels, plays, and films. Audiences go to the theatre or the cinema to be moved, to live vicariously through a broader range of experiences and emotions. In the words of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, head of the University of Southern California’s Brain and Creativity Institute:
We cannot control emotions willfully. . . . We can control, in part, whether a would-be inducer image be allowed to remain as a target of our thoughts. . . . We can also control, in part, the expression of some emotions-suppress our anger, mask our sadness-but most of us are not very good at it and that is one reason why we pay a lot to see good actors who are skilled at controlling the expression of their emotions.1
