Projections

The Journal for Movies and Mind

Editors
Joseph P. Magliano, Georgia State University
Maarten Coëgnarts, University of Antwerp


Subjects: Film Studies


Published in association with The Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image  

 

Winner of the 2008 AAP/PSP Prose Award for Best New Journal in the Social Sciences & Humanities!

 


Projections General Call for Papers

 

Latest Issue Table of Contents

Projections
Volume 19, Issue 1
Table of Contents


Cognitivism in Film and Media Studies: A Reappraisal
Maarten Coëgnarts and Joseph P. Magliano

“No matter how terrifying, I want the truth”: A Stylistic Analysis of Suspense in Found Footage Horror Films
Luca Willems

The Time Loop as a Temporal Loupe: Epistemic Structure and the Magnification of Subjective Experience in Edge of Tomorrow (2014)
Jérôme Sackur

Meaning-Making from Films: A Multi-Method Exploration of Meaning-Making in Self-Selected Meaningful Films
Rhanna Haverkort, Sara Grady, Serena Daalmans, and Allison Eden

In Defense of Cognitivism: A Response to Wyatt Moss-Wellington, Margrethe Bruun Vaage, and Catalin Brylla’s “What Can Cognitive Media Studies Bring to Social Justice?”
Malcolm Turvey

Book Reviews
Erica Joan Dymond, ed. Grief in Contemporary Horror Cinema: Screening Loss. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2023, 230 pp, $105 (hardcover), ISBN: 9781793633934.
Reviewed by Xavier Aldana Reyes

Eleftheria Thanouli, A Guide to Post-classical Narration: The Future of Film Storytelling. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024, 288 pp, $39.95 (paperback), ISBN: 9781501393075.
Reviewed by Antonio Loriguillo-López and Teresa Sorolla-Romero

Robert Sinnerbrink, New Philosophies of Film : An Introduction to Cinema as a Way of Thinking, 2nd edition. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022, 432 pp, $29.95 paperpack, ISBN: 978-1350181922.
Reviewed by Enrico Terrone

Margrethe Bruun Vaage, The Female Avenger, Women’s Anger and Rape-Revenge Film and Television, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2024, 216 pp, $110 hardback, ISBN: 9781399532099.
Reviewed by Iris Vidmar Jovanović

Volume 18 / 2024, 3 issues per volume (spring, summer, winter)

Winner of the 2008 AAP/PSP Prose Award for Best New Journal in the Social Sciences & Humanities!
Read the Press Release | Visit the Prose Awards site


Aims & Scope

Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind is an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal that explores how the mind experiences, understands, and interprets the audiovisual and narrative structures of cinema and other visual media. Recognizing cinema as an art form, the journal aims to integrate established traditions of analyzing media aesthetics with current research into perception, cognition, and emotion, according to frameworks supplied by philosophy of mind, phenomenology, psychology, and the cognitive-and neurosciences. The journal seeks to facilitate a dialogue between scholars in these disciplines and bring the study of moving image media to the forefront of contemporary intellectual debate.

Submissions are welcomed from a variety of scholarly methods within the humanities and the sciences, from aesthetic to empirical, theoretical, and historical approaches. We especially welcome interdisciplinary approaches that bridge the traditional humanities/sciences division. Accordingly, we invite and consider several forms of submission. Please read the Submit section of this page carefully to ensure that your submission aligns with the particular requirements for each format.


Indexing/Abstracting

Projections is indexed/abstracted in:

  • Art Abstracts (Ebsco)
  • Art Index (Ebsco)
  • Bibliometric Research Indicator List (BFI)
  • British Humanities Index (Proquest)
  • Emerging Sources Citation Index (Web of Science)
  • European Reference Index for the Humanities and the Social Sciences (ERIH PLUS)
  • FIAF International Index to Film Periodicals (Proquest)
  • IBR – International Bibliography of Book Reviews of Scholarly Literature on the Humanities and Social Sciences (De Gruyter)
  • IBZ – International Bibliography of Periodical Literature (De Gruyter)
  • MLA Directory of Periodicals
  • MLA International Bibliography
  • Norwegian Register for Scientific Journals, Series and Publishers
  • Scopus (Elsevier)

Co-Editors
Joseph P. Magliano, Educational Psychology, Georgia State University, USA
Maarten Coëgnarts, Film Studies, University of Antwerp / LUCA School of Arts, Belgium

Associate Editors
Alaina Schempp, Film and Creative Writing, University of Birmingham, UK
Tim Smith, Data Science, University of the Arts, London, UK
Margrethe Bruun Vaage, Film Studies, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway

Editorial Board
Richard Allen, Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong
Katalin E. Bálint, Media Psychology, VU Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Anne Bartsch, Communications and Media Studies, Leipzig University, Germany
Todd Berliner, Film Studies, University of North Carolina at Wilmington, USA
John Bateman, Applied Linguistics, University of Bremen, Germany
Catalin Brylla, Media and Communications, Bournemouth University, UK
Noel Carroll, Philosophy, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, USA
Neil Cohn, Communication and Cognition, Tilburg University, The Netherlands
Cynthia Freeland, Philosophy (Emeritus), University of Houston, USA
Torben Grodal, Film and Media Studies (Emeritus), University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Julian Hanich, Film Studies, University of Groningen, The Netherlands
Uri Hasson, Psychology, Princeton University, USA
Patrick Colm Hogan, English, University of Connecticut, USA
Miklós Kiss, Film Studies, University of Groningen, The Netherlands
Daniel Levin, Psychology and Human Development, Vanderbilt University, USA
Paisley Livingston, Philosophy (Emeritus), Lingnan University, Hong Kong
Lester Loschky, Psychology, Kansas State University, USA
Raymond Mar, Psychology, York University, Canada
Ted Nannicelli, Film and Television Studies, University of Queensland, Australia
Karen Pearlman, Screen Practice and Production, Macquarie University, Australia
Carl Plantinga, Communication, Calvin University, USA
Gal Raz, Media Neuroscience, Tel Aviv University, Israel
Robert Sinnerbrink, Philosophy, Macquarie University, Australia
Murray Smith, Film, University of Kent, UK
Jane Stadler, Film and Media Studies, University of New England, Australia
Ed S. Tan, Department of Media Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen and Amsterdam School of Communications Research (Emeritus), University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Pia Tikka, Film Studies, Baltic Film, Media, and Arts School, Tallinn University, Estonia
Katherine Thomson-Jones, Philosophy, Oberlin College, USA
Malcolm Turvey, Film and Media Studies, Tufts University, USA
Jeffrey Zacks, Psychological and Brain Sciences, Washington University in St. Louis, USA

Founding Editor: Ira Konigsberg, Film (Emeritus), University of Michigan, USA

Manuscript Submission

Please review the submission and style guidelines carefully before submitting.

The editorial board welcomes contributions. Authors should submit articles as attachments by e-mail, formatted as Microsoft Word or Rich Text Format (RTF) files. Electronic submissions are preferred, but mailed contributions will be reviewed. Please note that all correspondence will be transmitted via e-mail. Submissions without complete and properly formatted reference lists may be rejected. Manuscripts accepted for publication that do not conform to the Projections style will be returned to the author for amendment.

Send submissions to Joseph P. Magliano and Maarten Coëgnarts via the journal’s online submissions system: http://ojs.berghahnjournals.com/index.php/proj.

Authors must register with the journal on the submission website prior to submitting, or, if already registered, they can simply log in. On registering as an Author, authors have the option of also registering as a Reviewer (to be called upon to undertake peer reviews of other submissions).

View Guest Editor Guidelines here.

Book Reviews
If you are interested in reviewing a monograph for Projections, please email an expression of interest to Associate Editor Alaina Schempp: A.P.Schempp@bham.ac.uk.
If you are a publisher who would like to inform Projections about a prospective title for review, please send all relevant information (including the most direct means of obtaining a review copy) to Associate Editor Alaina Schempp: A.P.Schempp@bham.ac.uk.

Have other questions? Please refer to the Berghahn Info for Authors page for general information and guidelines including topics such as article usage and permissions for Berghahn journal article authors. 

to 10 substantially shorter articles.


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As a contributor to a Berghahn Books Journal, you are responsible for completing, signing, and returning one of the signed license agreements with your submitted article. It is your responsibility to ensure the correct license is used for your institutional requirements. If your article is not Open Access, the editor will supply you with the license form for signing.

If your article is Open Access by default, Authors will use the CC BY-NC-ND - Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-noDerivs License, if you require a different license due to funder requirements please contact copyright@berghahnjournals.com


Ethics Statement

Authors published in Projections certify that their works are original and their own. The editors certify that all materials, with the possible exception of editorial introductions, book reviews, and some types of commentary, have been subjected to double-blind peer review by qualified scholars in the field. While the publishers and the editorial board make every effort to see that no inaccurate or misleading data, opinions or statements appear in this journal, they wish to make clear that the data and opinions appearing in the articles herein are the sole responsibility of the contributor concerned. For a more detailed explanation concerning these qualifications and responsibilities, please see the complete Projections ethics statement.

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Membership

The Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image (SCSMI)

Leading the study of how moving-image media shape and are shaped by human psychological activity

The Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image (SCSMI) is an interdisciplinary organization of scholars interested in cognitive, philosophical, aesthetic, neurophysiological, and evolutionary-psychological approaches to the analysis of film and other moving-image media.

Membership in SCSMI, including a print subscription and online access to Projections, is now directly handled by the association. Please visit the SCSMI website to join as a new member, to renew your membership, or to register for SCSMI annual meetings.

SCSMI members: For online access to Projections, please visit the SCSMI website and log in.

Members of SCSMI seek to understand, among other things, the ways these media arouse our senses, stir our emotions, and prod us to thought. They explore how conceptions of social organization and human nature find their way into films, television, video games, and online videos. Their research seeks to explain the power of movies over audiences, what popular films tell us about the ways our minds work, and how documentaries and avant-garde films engage us. How may media products bear the traces of social intelligence and evolved capacities? What philosophical issues are at stake in examining media from a psychological perspective? These are just some of the questions SCSMI members pursue in their own research, at SCSMI conferences, and in the pages of Projections. The gatherings are lively; the research articles are deeply informed and consistently provocative.

We invite all people interested in understanding media from a broadly cognitive perspective to join us in exploring the range and depth of the moving image.

Renew your SCSMI membership or join as a new member!

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This article describes a new method for assessing the effect of a given film on viewers' brain activity. Brain activity was measured using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during free viewing of films, and inter-subject correlation analysis (ISC) was used to assess similarities in the spatiotemporal responses across viewers' brains during movie watching. Our results demonstrate that some films can exert considerable control over brain activity and eye movements. However, this was not the case for all types of motion picture sequences, and the level of control over viewers' brain activity differed as a function of movie content, editing, and directing style. We propose that ISC may be useful to film studies by providing a quantitative neuroscientific assessment of the impact of different styles of filmmaking on viewers' brains, and a valuable method for the film industry to better assess its products. Finally, we suggest that this method brings together two separate and largely unrelated disciplines, cognitive neuroscience and film studies, and may open the way for a new interdisciplinary field of “neurocinematic” studies.

Author:

The intention of most film editing is to create the impression of continuity by editing together discontinuous viewpoints. The continuity editing rules are well established yet there exists an incomplete understanding of their cognitive foundations. This article presents the Attentional Theory of Cinematic Continuity (AToCC), which identifies the critical role visual attention plays in the perception of continuity across cuts and demonstrates how perceptual expectations can be matched across cuts without the need for a coherent representation of the depicted space. The theory explains several key elements of the continuity editing style including match-action, matchedexit/entrances, shot/reverse-shot, the 180° rule, and point-of-view editing. AToCC formalizes insights about viewer cognition that have been latent in the filmmaking community for nearly a century and demonstrates how much vision science in general can learn from film.

This article extends current theorizing in media psychology on audience responses to cinema by examining individuals' perceptions of meaningfulness. Specifically, it presents the results of a study designed to expand upon research on psychological and subjective well-being to experiences and memories of films that are perceived as particularly meaningful by viewers. Characteristics and themes of such films are examined and identified, as well as the specific emotional responses that accompany perceptions of meaningful cinema.

Historically, debates over media violence have been a central focus of media research. Yet lacking from these debates is a meaningful discussion about the conceptualization of media violence. We argue that violence is not a monolithic construct, and is based on viewer perceptions of specific types of images and framing in media content. This idea has scholarly precedence: In 2002 and 2003, Potter and his colleagues proposed that perceptions of violence are formed as audience members make assessments about the relative levels of (in order) graphicness, realism, and justification for witnessed, on-screen violent actions. This article furthers this tri-partite conceptualization by using a binary-choice conjoint analysis to determine the role of each attribute in guiding audience perceptions of and preference for violent media in film and video games. For both media types, justification was the most central factor in shaping perceptions of violence, but realism was the most important predictor for the preference of violence.

This article examines embodied visual meaning in film, the ways that film makes use of recurring dynamic patterns of our shared bodily interactions with the world (image schemas) to communicate abstract meaning to the viewer. Following the lead of recent discoveries in the field of neuroscience, the article argues that this metaphorical transference of abstract thought by means of image schemas is possible via the activation of embodied mirroring mechanisms in the observer. This empathetic and physical encounter of the viewer with the representational content and form of the work is crucial to the understanding of abstract conceptual thought in film.