Catharsis Through Cinema: An Italian Qualitative Study on Watching Tragedies to Mitigate the Fear of COVID-19.

Among different ways of coping with the unsettling situation of the COVID-19 pandemic, a very peculiar one has been identified: a more frequent request, by the general population, of movies or TV series related to the very theme of viruses, contagions, and epidemics. The aim of the present study was to explore this peculiar phenomenon, in order to identify people's emotions and cognitions during and after the process, and to better understand the possible psychological function cinema can have during moments of intense and generalized crisis like the present COVID-19 pandemic. Fifteen Italian adults took part in the study - eight women and seven men (average age = 30 years, SD = 10.