ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Media Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1641217
This article is part of the Research TopicDigital Citizenship in the New Era of Social MediaView all 15 articles
Constructing Belonging through Mediated Memory: Multimodal Perception and Narrative Semantics in War Films
Provisionally accepted
- 1Universiti Teknologi MARA, Shah Alam, Malaysia
- 2Ningbo University of Finance and Economics, Ningbo, China
- 3South-West University "Neofit Rilski", Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria
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This study investigates how contemporary Chinese war films construct a sense of belonging among domestic audiences through three interrelated perceptual modalities: emotional expression, semantic cues, and musical structure. Grounded in the framework of media memory theory, the research analyzes a corpus of high-grossing films using facial expression recognition (FaceReader), semantic clustering (BERT embeddings), and soundtrack analysis (MuseNet-based modeling). Audience feedback was collected via online questionnaires (N = 379, aged 18–60) to validate the affective resonance of selected "core clips." Statistical comparisons were performed to identify the relative influence of each modality. Results suggest that patterns of national identity, moral resonance, and emotional synchrony converge to shape a distinctive aesthetic of belonging. This study contributes to a deeper understanding of how media memory transforms affective experiences into collective identification, while also reflecting on the methodological boundaries between subjective interpretation and computational objectivity.
Keywords: war movies, sense of belonging, character interaction, Semantic effect, musical features
Received: 04 Jun 2025; Accepted: 18 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Zheng, Wang and Wang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Zhaoqiang Wang, wangzhaoqiang1011@gmail.com
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