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Abstract: This article summarizes an evidence-based study that adapts a breakpoint approach to investigate how elements of television narratives (two half-hour episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents: "Lamb to the Slaughter" and "The Case of Mr. Pelham") were considered meaningful to viewers. Actions considered meaningful were found to be high in informational and emotional content, and primarily consisted of plot points where changes in narrative direction and protagonist's goals were perceived as interpretively salient. Viewers also registered as meaningful those scenes that were character centered and provided subjective access to the main characters. The article reviews segmentation behavior in the relevant film theory literature to contextualize study, and concludes by summarizing other potential applications of an adapted breakpoint approach beyond the investigation of dramatic structure.
Keywords: action parsing, breakpoint, dramatic structure, narrative schemata, segmentation, segmentation behavior, television narrative
What do individuals find meaningful when they watch a narrative film and do all individuals agree on what is meaningful? In order to address this question, we have adapted a reverse-correlation method used to study event segmentation, or breakpoints, to identify what an audience views as meaningful within a film.We further investigated what makes the identified moments meaningful by asking a second set of participants to rate the previously identified moments in terms of their emotional and informational content. Results indicate that moments selected as meaningful possess high informational and emotional content, and sheds new, empirical-based evidence on film theory.
Breakpoints were developed in the work of Newtson (1976) as a means of assessing how people observe and understand other people's behavior. In the original study, breakpoints were focused on procedural actions, such as household chores, in order to see whether there was any agreement between participants as to when one task ended and another began, hence a "breakpoint" between two actions. Equally important to the breakpoints were what Newtson termed "nonbreakpoints," which were the events that occurred between the breakpoints where the participants did not identify a significant change in behavior. Nonbreakpoints were less well remembered by the participants in a subsequent memory test (Newtson 1976). The experiments themselves rely on self-reporting by simply asking the participant to press a button when the events in the film satisfy the criteria of a specific question. As Newtson...