Professor Catherine Loveday, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, was interviewed for the BBC Radio 4 All in the Mind programme about the psychological impact of soap operas on their audiences.
Discussing the impact of soap operas and the BBC Radio 4 soap opera ‘The Archers’, Professor Loveday said: “I think [people] are [invested in them], and I wonder if it’s even more like this for something like The Archers which is on the radio because we have to cognitively work harder…Everyone has their own image of what the different characters look like, so in a sense when we are watching TV it’s kind of passively fed to us but with this we really are invested because we are having to work to create what it looks like.”
Discussing how people connect with characters and see things from different people’s points of view, she said: “I think that is really important because essentially our beliefs and our perceptions and even our memories are based on what we know and what we see and so if somebody behaves in a particular way we judge it based on what we know of the situation. But what is so great about a soap opera is that we get the chance to kind of see their backstory and work out why they were behaving the way they were.”
She added: “I think that’s really important that we can recognise ourselves and we can recognise others. I’ve seen this in the clinic in fact, we had a patient once that came into the clinic who had a diagnosis of normal pressure hydrocephalus and it is quite often missed or misdiagnosed but her family had only picked up on it because a character in Eastenders had it, so it was really valuable for that family.”
Listen to the full interview on BBC Sounds.
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