http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_five_year_engagement/ "The five year engagement" is a romantic comedy at a theater near you. The primary female character is a social psychologist who gets a 2-year post doc at the University of Michigan (several shots of the "department of psychology" sign there and lot of college scenes) causing the couple to move there from San Francisco and her fiancée to give up his job as a chef. Their adjustment to Michigan is presented as one of the stressors in their relationship in addition to issues with the supervising professor (no spoilers!). A couple of notes of interesting/awkward scenes -the primary experiment the lab group discusses is delayed gratification in the famous "don't eat the marshmallow" (they even show some footage of kids trying to not eat the marshmallow). In the adult version they want to offer stale donuts and tell the participants that they can wait for 20 minutes to get fresh ones. The lab also suggest a mood manipulation in the experiment. They don't present the dependent variable very clearly (presumably it would have to measured over time). That part seems pretty well done (like the script writers actually talked to some research/social psychologists). There is an odd scene in which the lab researchers are all looking through the one way mirror at the gathered participants and the lab researchers are negotiating whom among them should deliver the key instructions about the donuts. Obviously in real life that would have been carefully rehearsed ahead of time. -when she discusses her results she says that she "found a 25% correlation" (yikes). Presumably you would not find correlations in an experiment! -a scene when the primary character first gets to U of Michigan shows her supervising professor lecturing in a social psychology class about obedience. The fire alarm goes off and as students get ready to leave the professor reassures them that it is not necessary even though you can see fire fighters rushing upstairs. Students sit back down and he then talks about authority and then reveals that the fire alarm and fire fighters were all a spoof. The only odd thing here is that it appears that the primary character is a student (or maybe TA?) in the class which she obviously would not be if she were hired as a post doc. I assume the filmmakers could not figure out how to introduce this scene other than by sticking her in the class room.
Oh and at the end the issue of delayed gratification come up in the content of their relationship. Should you should eat the donut (slight stale as it might be) or wait for something better? I don't know if research has examined the issue of delayed gratification in the context of romantic relationships! Anyway, for those of you teaching social psychology the topic of the accuracy of this movie might come up. Marie Marie Helweg-Larsen, Ph.D. Associate Professor l Department of Psychology Kaufman 168 l Dickinson College Phone 717.245.1562 l Fax 717.245.1971 http://users.dickinson.edu/~helwegm/index.html --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=17676 or send a blank email to leave-17676-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
