Most college students view their midterm assignments as an opportunity to excel in their classes. PAU master’s student Darrick Diaz, however, sees his assignments as potentials to create art. As a self-taught filmmaker, Diaz has career goals of creating meaningful documentaries about mental health, therefore he chose to earn his degrees at PAU due to its emphasis on psychology and technology.
When given the assignment to create a short, informative video about a psychological topic in Dr. Charlotte Beard’s class “Affective Bases of Behavior,” Diaz applied his filmmaking skills to create a four-minute film about “Charles Darwin and the History of Emotions.” Diaz went over and above the call of the assignment and combined a myriad of short video clips with powerful music and voice-over to evoke an emotionally gripping experience on par with professional filmmaking. Watch the video here.
“It’s easy to just share the information, but I was inspired to create something different,” says Diaz. “I wanted to create something that reminds us that we are actual people in the class, something that touches the spirit of our humanity, and I know how to do that with film.”
Diaz chose this topic because he is interested in the history of psychology. As an emerging scientist, Diaz is constantly questioning assumptions in the field of psychology because he knows that as psychological concepts are passed on from one generation to the next, they inevitably change due to interpretation. By learning about the history of psychology, Diaz gains a better understanding of where current beliefs originate.
“Ideas have history. With each generation, there is another interpretation of the original findings, so I want to understand the primary sources, such as Darwin’s findings, before learning these ideas from secondary sources,” says Diaz. “With my film, I hope to convey that it’s important for students to not just accept what they are learning blindly, but to question and investigate where these concepts come from.”
The biggest message that Diaz hopes his viewers will take away from his film is that humans can become unified through the scientific understanding of our shared ancestry. In Diaz’s short film, he shares how Charles Darwin identified universal emotions experienced by all humans, regardless of race or culture.
“During the time of Darwin, the race sentiment was that the white race had a more advanced ancestry,” says Diaz. “Even though Darwin didn’t realize his work was combatting racism, it had that impact because it revealed that no matter which culture you are from, we all come from the same place genetically, and those findings implicated a sense of equality and an inherent solidarity.”
Fortunately for PAU, Diaz will continue his studies next year in the PhD in Clinical Psychology program. In the future, Diaz plans to write, film, and produce documentaries related to shared mental health experiences to unite people of any culture through empathy.
“The one universal language we have is felt empathy because it doesn’t require words, which is why film can tell this story,” says Diaz. “Studying film is something that I will continue to do because one day, I’m going to make meaningful documentaries for the world to see. And, with my PAU education, I’ll have the articulation of the scientific research to back the things I care about such as building a culture around empathy with film.”
Watch Darrick Diaz's video!