Maja Djikic

Emotion and narrative fiction: Interactive influences before, during, and after reading

Emotions are central to the experience of literary narrative fiction. Affect and mood can influence what book people choose, based partly on whether their goal is to change or maintain their current emotional state. Once having chosen a book, the narrative itself acts to evoke and transform emotions, both directly through the events and characters depicted and through the cueing of emotionally valenced memories. Once evoked by the story, these emotions can in turn influence a persons experience of the narrative. Lastly, emotions experienced during reading may have consequences after closing the covers of a book. This article reviews the current state of empirical research for each of these stages, providing a snapshot of what is known about the interaction between emotions and literary narrative fiction. With this, we can begin to sketch the outlines of what remains to be discovered.

On Being Moved by Art: How Reading Fiction Transforms the Self

An experiment tested the hypothesis that art can cause significant changes in the experience of ones own personality traits under laboratory conditions. After completing a set of questionnaires, including the Big-Five Inventory (BFI) and an emotion checklist, the experimental group read the short story The Lady With the Toy Dog by Chekhov, while the control group read a comparison text that had the same content as the story, but was documentary in form. The comparison text was controlled for length, readability, complexity, and interest level. Participants then completed again the BFI and emotion checklist, randomly placed within a larger set of questionnaires. The results show the experimental group experienced significantly greater change in self-reported experience of personality traits than the control group, and that emotion change mediated the effect of art on traits. Further consideration should be given to the role of art in the facilitation of processes of personality growth and maturation.

Believing Is Seeing Using Mindlessness (Mindfully) to Improve Visual Acuity

These experiments show that vision can be improved by manipulating mind-sets. In Study 1, participants were primed with the mind-set that pilots have excellent vision. Vision improved for participants who experientially became pilots (by flying a realistic flight simulator) compared with control participants (who performed the same task in an ostensibly broken flight simulator). Participants in an eye-exercise condition (primed with the mind-set that improvement occurs with practice) and a motivation condition (primed with the mind-set “try and you will succeed”) demonstrated visual improvement relative to the control group. In Study 2, participants were primed with the mind-set that athletes have better vision than nonathletes. Controlling for arousal, doing jumping jacks resulted in greater visual acuity than skipping (perceived to be a less athletic activity than jumping jacks). Study 3 took advantage of the mind-set primed by the traditional eye chart: Because letters get progressively smaller on successive lines, people expect that they will be able to read the first few lines only. When participants viewed a reversed chart and a shifted chart, they were able to see letters they could not see before. Thus, mind-set manipulation can counteract physiological limits imposed on vision.

Writing as Thinking

Writing is analyzed as thinking that uses paper or other media to externalize and manipulate symbolic expressions. Mental operations of natural language can occur somewhat independently, and they communicate well with language that has been written, but for skilled writing these operations need elaborate installation in the mind. We explore four methods to see how expert writers externalize thoughts and interact with them: laboratory comparisons of novices and experts, interviews with accomplished writers (mostly of prose fiction), biographical analysis of Jane Austens development as a writer, and consideration of Gustave Flauberts notes and drafts. Writers can use paper to extend their thinking, and to create frameworks of cues that enable readers of a story to construct mental models that they may enter empathetically.

The Bitter-Sweet Labor of Emoting: The Linguistic Comparison of Writers and Physicists

ABSTRACT: In this exploratory archival study, the motivation of writers of fiction and physicists was examined by studying word usage as a clue to unconscious motivators of their work. The hypothesis was that artists make art to deal with issues in their own lives, thus relying on emotions, particularly negative emotions (markers of presence of issues), to govern their work. Consequently, it was predicted that distinguished writers of fiction, as compared to distinguished physicists, would use more emotion-related words when discussing their work, particularly negative emotion-related words. Interviews conducted with 9 physicists were matched to the interviews with 9 writers, and analyzed using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) program (Pennebaker, Francis, & Booth, 2001). Writers used significantly more emotion-related words, in particular more negative-emotion words, including the greater use of anger-related, anxiety-related, and depression or sadness-related words. Almost identical results were obtained when the 9 physicists were compared to the nonmatched, larger sample of 124 writers. The study implies differences of inner preoccupation (relating to work) between creative people oriented towards literary art and physical science.

Opening the Closed Mind: The Effect of Exposure to Literature on the Need for Closure

The need for cognitive closure has been found to be associated with a variety of suboptimal information processing strategies, leading to decreased creativity and rationality. This experiment tested the hypothesis that exposure to fictional short stories, as compared with exposure to nonfictional essays, will reduce need for cognitive closure. One hundred participants were assigned to read either an essay or a short story (out of a set of 8 essays and 8 short stories matched for length, reading difficulty, and interest). After reading, their need for cognitive closure was assessed. As hypothesized, when compared to participants in the essay condition, participants in the short story condition experienced a significant decrease in self-reported need for cognitive closure. The effect was particularly strong for participants who were habitual readers (of either fiction or non-fiction). These findings suggest that reading fictional literature could lead to better procedures of processing information generally, including those of creativity.

Serene Arts: The Effect of Personal Unsettledness and of Paintings' Narrative Structure on Personality

Previous research has demonstrated that art can produce some variation in self-reported personality traits. The present experiment addressed two questions. First, does visual art cause greater fluctuations in personality for unsettled or serene individuals, and second, do unsettled individuals respond more to art as a function of its narrative structure? Participants (N = 61) completed a set of questionnaires, then viewed a series of paintings, Giottos Seven Vices, either unmodified to exhibit high narrative structure, or modified to exhibit low narrative structure, and then filled another set of questionnaires. The results show that unsettled individuals experienced significantly less fluctuation of personality across conditions, and that in the condition of low narrative coherence, serene individuals experienced significantly more personality fluctuations than unsettled individuals. The results suggest that unsettled persons may need more narrative coherence in the art they engage with, while serene individuals may remain open to less-structured and more ambiguous art.

On the fragility of the artist: art’s precarious triad

Beauty is truth, truth beauty, – that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. – John Keats When Amy Winehouse, a 27-year-old British singer, died in her London flat in July of 2011, few were surprised. While her musical talent was prodigious (her singing was compared to that of Billy Holiday), her battle with alcohol and drug addiction also attracted public attention. Her breakout song was entitled “Rehab.” Was she not another artist sacrificed at the altar of the muses? Are we not tripped, here, by a stereotype (Kaufman et al ., 2006), seduced by an availability heuristic? After all, how many alcoholics perish quietly out of the public eye? And given that we are unable to calculate conditional probabilities for this kind of case, we may wonder whether the chance of Amy Winehouse overdosing on alcohol would have been the same if she had not been an accomplished songwriter and singer (Silvia and Kaufman, 2010). An argument of the kind that can follow from assuming causal connections between artistic creativity and mental illness has been made by Currie (2011). He drew on a study by Post (1994) who made psychiatric diagnoses of 291 famous men from biographies. Post found that 48 percent of writers had severe psychopathology, whereas rates of psychopathology in scientists, statesmen, and thinkers were lower. On the basis of these and similar data, Currie argues that we cannot expect to learn anything useful from people who are as crazy as many writers seem to be. In this argument, Currie accepts that correlation means causality; that mental illness contributes to the writer’s art; and he assumes that the illnesses of the writers were permanent. Therefore, he concludes, one should not take the writers seriously. He also makes no comparison with levels of mental illness in the ordinary community.

Creativity and its Discontents: The Weary Voyager Model of Creativity in Relation to Self

Abstract With the Weary Voyager Model of creativity we propose that difficulties of creativity can be associated with a perceptual tendency to see and act on the world as it was in the past rather than as it is in the present. The model suggests that three configurations of selfhood tend to oppose creativity. First is self-deception, in which the Narrative Self (what we tell ourselves and others about ourselves) is distant from our Experiential Self (our day-to-day experience of urges and actions). Second is rigidity in the Narrative Self, which can impose a heavy weight that Voyagers must carry. Third is a reenactment by the Experiential Self of previously learned habits regardless of changing circumstances, which imposes another weight to carry. Implications for reducing self-deception, and reducing unnecessary weights of the Narrative Self and Experiential Self, are discussed as ways of increasing creativity.

Psychology of Narrative Art.

Artistic narrative has been recognized in fictional genres such as poetry, plays, novels, short stories, and films. It occurs also in nonfictional genres such as essays and biographies. We review evidence on the empirical exploration of effects of narrative, principally fiction, on how it enables people to become more empathetic, on how foregrounded phrases encourage readers to recognize the significance of events as if for the first time in ways that tend to elicit emotion, and on how literary works can help people to change their own personalities. We then suggest 3 principles that characterize narrative art in psychological terms: a focus on emotion and empathy, a focus on character, and a basis of indirect communication.