Controlling emotions: movies & (virtual) reality | Dr Brendan Rooney | TEDxUCD

Stories are, and always have been, a powerful way to simulate experiences and share social knowledge. They give us a context in which we can play with our emotion and are ‘sandbox’, for exploring feelings and honing emotional management skills. As cinema becomes more immersive and more realistic, the power of cinematic storytelling is being supercharged.
In his TEDxUCD 2015 talk Brendan calls on us to reflect on this development and the effect of such realism on our emotional engagement with entertainment.
Dr Brendan Rooney is a lecturer in the UCD School of Psychology whose research interests include the cognitive and emotional engagement with media, arts and entertainment.
Dr Brendan Rooney is a lecturer in the UCD School of Psychology where he studied both at undergraduate and postgraduate level, completing his PhD in the Psychology of Film in 2011.
His research interests include the cognitive and emotional engagement with media, arts and entertainment. He is particularly interested in how media ‘realism’ interacts with emotion and social cognition. Through his research and teaching he has worked as part of a number of interdisciplinary and international research teams, with creative and entertainment industry experts.
In addition to UCD he has also worked as a graduate researcher and lecturer in NCAD and IADT.
He founded and currently chairs the Psychological Society of Ireland’s Special Interest Group for Media, the Arts & Cyberpsychology (SIGMAC).
Twitter: @brenrooney
This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at