{"id":12531,"date":"2011-07-27T23:59:51","date_gmt":"2011-07-27T22:59:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/?p=12531"},"modified":"2011-07-28T01:24:27","modified_gmt":"2011-07-28T00:24:27","slug":"the-saddest-movie-scene-of-all-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/2011\/07\/27\/the-saddest-movie-scene-of-all-time\/","title":{"rendered":"The Saddest Movie Scene of All Time?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The Smithsonian magazine recently reported that The Champ<\/a><\/strong> (1979) contains the saddest movie scene of all time<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Although you might think that such a claim was the result of a reader poll or a subjective list by journalists, it turns out to have a basis in science.<\/p>\n

Franco Zefirelli’s boxing drama starring Jon Voight, Faye Dunaway and Ricky Schroder has a special place in the hearts of scientists, who have used a scene from the film<\/a>\u00a0(spoiler alert if you click through) to gauge subject’s emotions.<\/p>\n

Richard Chin writes in the current issue<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The Champ has been used in experiments to see if depressed people are more likely to cry than non-depressed people (they aren\u2019t). It has helped determine whether people are more likely to spend money when they are sad (they are) and whether older people are more sensitive to grief than younger people (older people did report more sadness when they watched the scene). Dutch scientists used the scene when they studied the effect of sadness on people with binge eating disorders (sadness didn\u2019t increase eating).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It dates back to research conducted by the University of California in 1988, when psychology researchers were looking for movie scenes that triggered a single emotion at a time.<\/p>\n

The emotions and films used to trigger them were as follows:<\/p>\n