ABSTRACT
The field of popular Hindi cinema scholarship, typically referred to as Bollywood studies (Gehlawat 2010), has traditionally been characterized by textual or sociological analyses of key films or filmmakers. More recently, scholars have begun to explore the utilization of quantitative research methods to address questions regarding Hindi film content, viewer responses, and the like (e.g., Schaefer and Karan 2011; Ramasubramanian 2005). In this chapter we draw upon a quantitative research paradigm more than 70 years old and apply it to the viewing of popular Hindi cinema. In particular, we study two forms of content often discussed in the theoretical literature – violent and romantic–sexual content – through the utilization of electroencephalographic (EEG) analysis of viewers’ physiological responses.
