Gosh!

Here's a story of moderate length about psychological research. Fair warning. :)

When I was at K-State, I had the chance to do quite a bit of research. Most of it involved things like responses to intrinsic emotionally-toned stimuli, social conditioning in rats, classic Stroop effect stuff, etc. But I was lucky enough to get to do some fun research as well. One of my favorite projects was conducting a pilot study on movie quoting. I worked with a professor in my department who is interested in the psychology of mass media, and we asked people all sorts of things about movie lines they quote, why, and what happens. It was entertaining. People quote movies so much. In fact, I recently came across this list of the AFI's top 100 movie quotations and I was surprised to see a bunch of phrases that I didn't even know were from movies.

I left K-State and I didn't really know what would happen to the movie quoting study. It turns out that other students worked with the same professor and continued the research. Then it was submitted to journals for peer review, there were revisions, years passed (not kidding), and finally it was published! Hooray!

Here's the reference, if you'd like to try to find it (yeah... it's published in English and Spanish):

Harris, R.J., Werth, A.J., Bures, K.E., & Bartel, C.M. (2008). Social movie quoting: What, why, and how? Ciencias Psicologicas, 2(1), 35-45.

To close, I'll give you two of Jonathan's favorite movie quotes:

"That's something we have in common - we both have dead people in our families." - Rushmore

"You don't get to tell me what to do ever again." - American Beauty