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This research tested an attitude interpretation of the appeal of tragedy that assumes people find tragedy appealing because they hold the attitude that it is good to feel bad when someone is suffering. In two studies using different films, subjects viewed a highly tragic version of a film or a less tragic version of the same film. As predicted from the attitude interpretation, in both studies an indirect measure of the attitude that is good to empathize with suffering was positively correlated with a measure of the appeal of the film for those viewing the highly tragic version. Important for the attitude interpretation, in both studies the correlation of the indirect attitude measure and the measure of the appeal of the film was significantly greater for those viewing the highly tragic version than for those viewing the less tragic version. A third study provided evidence that the indirect attitude measure employed in the first two studies does measure the attitude that it is good to empathize with suffering.
Judson Mills (Wed,) studied this question.