Time-synchronic comments on video streaming website reveal core structures of audience engagement in movie viewing

To what extent movie viewers are swept into a fictional world has long been pondered by psychologists and filmmakers. With the development of time-synchronic comments on online viewing platforms, we can now analyze viewers’ immediate responses toward movies. In this study, we collected over 3 million Chinese time-synchronic comments from a video streaming website. We first assessed emotion and cognition-related word rates in these comments with the Simplified Chinese version of the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (SCLIWC) and applied time-series clustering to the word rates. Then Hierarchical Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise (HDBSCAN) was conducted on the text to investigate the prevalent topics among the comments. We found different commenting behaviors in front of various movies and prototypical diachronic trajectories of the psychological engagement of the audience. We further identified how topics are discussed through time, and tried to account for viewer’s engagement, considering successively movie genres, topics and movie content. Among other points, we finally discussed the challenge in explaining the trajectories of engagement and the disconnection with narrative content. Overall, our study provides a new perspective on using social media data to answer questions from psychology and film studies. It underscores the potential of time-synchronic comments as a resource for detecting real-time human responses to specific events.