Kuleshov effect

The Kuleshov effect is a film editing(montage) effect demonstrated by Soviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov in the 1910s and 1920s. It is a mental phenomenon by which viewers derive more meaning from the interaction of two sequential shots than from a single shot in isolation.

research

The Kuleshov effect has been studied by psychologists only in recent years. Prince and Hensley (1992) recreated the original study design but did not find the alleged effect. The study had 137 participants but was a single-trial between-subject experiment, which is prone to noise in the data. Mobbs et al. (2006) did a within-subject fMRI study and found an effect for negative, positive, or neutral valence. When a neutral face was shown behind a sad scene, it seemed sad, when it was shown behind a happy scene it seemed happy. More recently, Barratt, Rédei, Innes-Ker, and van de Weijer (2016) tested 36 participants using 24 film sequences across five emotional conditions (happiness, sadness, hunger, fear, and desire) and a neutral control condition. Again, they were able to show that neutral faces were rated in accordance with the stimuli material, confirming Mobbs et al. (2006) findings.

Thus, despite the initial problems in testing the Kuleshov effect experimentally, researchers now agree that the context in which a face is shown has a significant effect on how the face is perceived.

To find out whether the Kuleshov effect can also be induced auditory, Baranowski and Hecht intercut different clips of faces with neutral scenes, featuring either happy music, sad music, or no music at all. They found that the music significantly influenced participants’ emotional judgments of facial expression.

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reference：wikipedia