The Emotion of Nature and the Nature of Emotion
Marc Jadoul — April 6, 2017 — April 6, 2017
Research by the BBC and the University of California Berkeley has found that watching nature documentaries makes people feel happy, while it reduces stress and anxiety. Overall, a majority of 7500 participants from the US, UK, Singapore, India, South Africa and Australia experienced significant increases in positive emotions including awe, joy, curiosity, contentment, enthusiasm, and amusement. The study also found a substantial decrease in emotions such as nervousness, anxiety, fear, stress, and tiredness.
In a BBC media release about the study, Prof. Dacher Keltner of UC Berkeley commented:
“The shifts in emotion demonstrated in the BBC study as a result of watching this powerful natural history [Planet Earth II] series are significant as we know that wonder and contentment are the foundations of human happiness. If people experience feelings of awe, they are more likely to display empathetic and charitable behaviours and have been shown to be better able to handle stress.”
Reading this article about the positive influence of natural images on humans made me think of one of my all-time favorite movie scenes: the euthanasia of Sol Roth in Richard Fleischer’s 1973 science-fiction film Soylent Green.
The movie plays in a starving New York City of the future (well, if you still can call 2022 “the future” …) that’s severely suffering from overpopulation, environmental pollution, and global warming. With the help of elderly academic, Solomon “Sol” Roth (played by Edward G. Robinson in his final role), NYPD detective Robert Thorn (played by Charlton Heston) investigates the murder of an executive at Soylent Corporation, the company that manufactures the high-energy Soylent Green food rations.
At the film’s conclusion, we see Sol Roth in one of New York’s euthanasia centers. He’s put to rest (aka “going home”) with orange-hued lighting, classical music (Tchaikovsky’s “Pathetique” symphony No. 6, Beethoven’s “Pastoral” symphony No. 6, and Grieg’s Peer Gynt), and a video projection with wild flora and fauna. And then, Sol reveals Soylent Green’s major secret: [spoiler alert!] the nutritious green wafers are made from human remains, before choosing assisted suicide with a lethal drug.
The fact that I consider this one of my favorite movie scenes, is not because of the actors’ performance – there’s little dialog or action in this specific scene – but because of the emotion that’s concentrated in these less than five minutes of video. With color, music, and nature images acting as amplifiers.
Maybe the above content can look a bit exotic for a post on a blog that’s labeled “business storytelling,” but I decided to share the article and the video clip as they show the power of emotion in fiction, non-fiction and science-fiction. Same is true in everyday life and business. I truly enjoyed every single episode of Planet Earth II. And, isn’t there a bit of Sol Roth in each of us?
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