Wow, this is most helpful. I have received messages from Hong Kong, Singapur and South Africa all the way to the US and Canada. Thanks a lot to all the contributors so far!
To continue the more theoretical debate: I believe that people who say "This movie made me really feel sad!" usually don't mean it pejoratively. Hence there must be at least a certain kind of pleasure (or enjoyment or "Genuss") involved. To be sure, neither is the "pleasure" completely and straightforwardly positive (for lack of a better word, call it bitter-sweet), nor will viewers exclusively experience "sadness". What could be described as a "sad scene" can bring all kinds of emotions into play, from positive artefact emotions to suspense, pity, admiration and so on. But sadness seems to be part of the phenomenological experience. Up to a certain tipping point, we even expect a positive correlation between sadness and positive valence in aesthetic contexts. The crucial question is, of course, what role sadness plays. Is it a negative emotion that functions as a (physiological) prerequisite for a conversion into something positive? Is it simply a "price to be paid" to get to something else that we experience as positive, as Carroll argues in terms of fear in horror films? Or is it a means for intensifying the positive experience (that's what 18th-century thinkers like Moses Mendelssohn, for instance, argued)? Honestly, I am not sure yet. But I tend to disagree with Carl Plantinga's "spillover"-conversion theory, based as it is on Dolf Zillmann's "excitation transfer" model. One reason is the fact that sadness is generally considered to be low in physiological arousal and therefore cannot really spill over in Plantinga's sense. I hope this does not sound overly trivial and fuzzy, Aaron...
Best, Julian
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