Reading a suspenseful literary text activates brain areas related to social cognition and predictive inference

Predicting subjective ratings of affect and comprehensibility with text features: a reader response study of narrative poetry

Literary reading is an interactive process between a reader and a text that depends on a balance between cognitive effort and emotional rewards. By studying both the crucial features of the text and of the subjective reader reception, a better understanding of this interactive process can be reached. In the present study, subjects (N=31) read and rated a work of narrative fiction that was written in a poetic style, thereby offering the readers two pathways to cognitive rewards: Aesthetic appreciation and narrative immersion. Using purely text-based quantitative descriptors, we were able to independently and accurately predict the subjective ratings in the dimensions comprehensibility, valence, arousal, and liking across roughly 140 pages of naturalistic text. The specific text features that were most important in predicting each rating dimension are discussed in detail. In addition, the implications of the findings are discussed more generally in the context of existing models of literary processing and future research avenues for empirical literary studies.

Developmental differences in the perception of naturalistic human movements

Introduction

It is widely believed that we are more attentive towards moving versus static stimuli. However, the neural correlates underlying the perception of human movements have not been extensively investigated in ecologically valid settings, nor has the developmental aspect of this phenomenon. Here, we set forth to investigate how human limb movements displayed in naturalistic videos influence the attentional engagement of children and young adults.

Methods

Thirty-nine healthy participants (4-26 years old) were presented with naturalistic videos featuring human goal-directed movements, while neural activity was recorded using electroencephalography (EEG). Video scenes were automatically annotated as containing arm, leg or no movement, using a machine learning algorithm. The viewers' attentional engagement was quantified by the intersubject correlation of EEG responses evoked by the videos.

Results

Our results demonstrate that scenes featuring limb movements, especially simultaneous arm and leg movements, elicit higher attentional engagement than scenes with no limb movement. Interestingly, this effect was found to diminish with age.

Discussion

Overall, our findings extend previous work on the perception of human motion by implementing naturalistic stimuli in the experimental design and extend the list of factors influencing the viewer's engagement exerted by naturalistic videos.

AI-powered narrative building for facilitating public participation and engagement

Algorithms, data, and AI (ADA) technologies permeate most societies worldwide because of their proven benefits in different areas of life. Governments are the entities in charge of harnessing the benefits of ADA technologies above and beyond providing government services digitally. ADA technologies have the potential to transform the way governments develop and deliver services to citizens, and the way citizens engage with their governments. Conventional public engagement strategies employed by governments have limited both the quality and diversity of deliberation between the citizen and their governments, and the potential for ADA technologies to be employed to improve the experience for both governments and the citizens they serve. In this article we argue that ADA technologies can improve the quality, scope, and reach of public engagement by governments, particularly when coupled with other strategies to ensure legitimacy and accessibility among a broad range of communities and other stakeholders. In particular, we explore the role “narrative building” (NB) can play in facilitating public engagement through the use of ADA technologies. We describe a theoretical implementation of NB enhanced by adding natural language processing, expert knowledge elicitation, and semantic differential rating scales capabilities to increase gains in scale and reach. The theoretical implementation focuses on the public’s opinion on ADA-related technologies, and it derives implications for ethical governance.

Stories in Action

Stories have played a central role in human social and political life for thousands of years. Despite their ubiquity in culture and custom, however, they feature only peripherally in formal government policymaking. Government policy has tended to rely on tools with more predictable responses-incentives, transfers, and prohibitions. We argue that stories can and should feature more centrally in government policymaking. We lay out how stories can make policy more effective, specifying how they complement established policy tools. We provide a working definition of stories' key characteristics, contrasting them with other forms of communication. We trace the evolution of stories from their ancient origins to their role in mediating the impact of modern technologies on society. We then provide an account of the mechanisms underlying stories' impacts on their audiences. We conclude by describing three functions of stories-learning, persuasion, and collective action.

Altered Cerebral Processing of Videos in Children with Motor Dysfunction Suggests Broad Embodiment of Perceptual Cognitive Functions

Embodied cognition theory suggests that motor dysfunctions affect cognition. We examined this hypothesis by inspecting whether cerebral processing of movies, featuring both goal-directed movements and content without humans, differ between children with congenital motor dysfunction and healthy controls. Electroencephalography was recorded from 23 healthy children and 23 children with limited or absent arm movement due to either arthrogryposis multiplex congenita or obstetric brachial plexus palsy. Each individual patient exhibited divergent neural responses, disclosed by significantly lower inter-subject correlation (ISC) of brain activity, during the videos compared to the healthy children. We failed to observe associations between this finding and the motor-related content of the various video scenes, suggesting that differences between the patients and controls reflect modulation of perceptual-cognitive processing of videos by upper-limb motor dysfunctions not limited to the watching-mirroring of motor actions. Thus, perceptual-cognitive processes in the brain seem to be more robustly embodied than has previously been thought.

Aesthetic appraisals of literary style and emotional intensity in narrative engagement are neurally dissociable

Humans are deeply affected by stories, yet it is unclear how. In this study, we explored two aspects of aesthetic experiences during narrative engagement - literariness and narrative fluctuations in appraised emotional intensity. Independent ratings of literariness and emotional intensity of two literary stories were used to predict blood-oxygen-level-dependent signal changes in 52 listeners from an existing fMRI dataset. Literariness was associated with increased activation in brain areas linked to semantic integration (left angular gyrus, supramarginal gyrus, and precuneus), and decreased activation in bilateral middle temporal cortices, associated with semantic representations and word memory. Emotional intensity correlated with decreased activation in a bilateral frontoparietal network that is often associated with controlled attention. Our results confirm a neural dissociation in processing literary form and emotional content in stories and generate new questions about the function of and interaction between attention, social cognition, and semantic systems during literary engagement and aesthetic experiences.

Naturalistic Stimuli in Affective Neuroimaging: A Review

Naturalistic stimuli such as movies, music, and spoken and written stories elicit strong emotions and allow brain imaging of emotions in close-to-real-life conditions. Emotions are multi-component phenomena: relevant stimuli lead to automatic changes in multiple functional components including perception, physiology, behavior, and conscious experiences. Brain activity during naturalistic stimuli reflects all these changes, suggesting that parsing emotion-related processing during such complex stimulation is not a straightforward task. Here, I review affective neuroimaging studies that have employed naturalistic stimuli to study emotional processing, focusing especially on experienced emotions. I argue that to investigate emotions with naturalistic stimuli, we need to define and extract emotion features from both the stimulus and the observer.

Neuroimaging of valence decisions in children and adults

To date, the neural underpinnings of affective components in language processing in children remain largely unknown. To fill this gap, the present study examined behavioural and neural correlates of children and adults performing the same auditory valence decision task with an event-related fMRI paradigm. Based on previous findings in adults, activations in anterior and posterior cingulate cortex, orbitofrontal cortex and left inferior frontal gyrus were expected for both positive and negative valence categories. Recent behavioural findings on valence decisions showed similar ratings and reaction time patterns in children and adults. This finding was successfully replicated in the present study. On a neural level, our analysis of affective language processing showed activations in regions associated with both semantic (superior and middle temporal and frontal) and affective (anterior and posterior cingulate, orbitofrontal and inferior frontal, insula and amygdala) processing. Neural activations in children and adults were systematically different in explicit affective word processing. In particular, adults showed a more distributed semantic network activation while children recruited additional subcortical structures.

Re-Living Suspense: Emotional and Cognitive Responses During Repeated Exposure to Suspenseful Film

Arguments about the effects of repeated exposure to a suspenseful narrative raise controversial disputes over the paradox of suspense. The lexical meaning and the theoretical analyses of suspense imply that suspense cannot be experienced repeatedly because, in such cases, the knowledge from prior viewings and the resolution of outcome will eliminate tension and suspense. However, previous studies have argued that suspense can be re-experienced even when the participants know the outcome or repeatedly confront a suspenseful narrative. This study investigated the effects of repeated exposure to a suspenseful film by collecting self-reported questionnaires and measuring psychophysiological responses. The participants (N = 50) watched clips of a suspenseful film three times and answered self-reported items regarding suspense, arousal, and enjoyment. Psychophysiological data, including skin conductance level (SCL) and electrocardiogram (ECG), were collected while the participants watched the video clips. It was hypothesized that self-reported suspense, arousal, and enjoyment as well as the physiological indices of arousal (SCL) and attention (ECG) would decrease upon repeated viewing of suspenseful clips. Furthermore, it was postulated that there would be inter-group differences depending on the awareness of potential or definite change in outcome at the end of repeatedly shown suspenseful events. The results showed that self-reported suspense and arousal, as well as the physiological measures of SCL, declined with repeated exposure, although there were no significant differences on self-reported enjoyment. No group difference was found in self-reported items, but meaningful significant changes were observed in the group comparison of SCL and ECG. The findings suggest that repeated exposure to suspenseful films could result in affective habituation or desensitization to repeated stimuli. The implications and the limitations of the current study and suggestions for future research are discussed.

Sentiment Analysis of Children and Youth Literature: Is There a Pollyanna Effect?

If the words of natural human language possess a universal positivity bias, as assumed by Boucher and Osgood’s (1969) famous Pollyanna hypothesis and computationally confirmed for large text corpora in several languages (Dodds et al., 2015), then children and youth literature (CYL) should also show a Pollyanna effect. Here we tested this prediction applying an unsupervised vector space model-based sentiment analysis tool called SentiArt (Jacobs, 2019) to two CYL corpora, one in English (372 books) and one in German (500 books). Pitching our analysis at the sentence level, and assessing semantic as well as lexico-grammatical information, both corpora show the Pollyanna effect and thus add further evidence to the universality hypothesis. The results of our multivariate sentiment analyses provide interesting testable predictions for future scientific studies of literature.

Movies and narratives as naturalistic stimuli in neuroimaging

Using movies and narratives as naturalistic stimuli in human neuroimaging studies has yielded significant advances in understanding of cognitive and emotional functions. The relevant literature was reviewed, with emphasis on how the use of naturalistic stimuli has helped advance scientific understanding of human memory, attention, language, emotions, and social cognition in ways that would have been difficult otherwise. These advances include discovering a cortical hierarchy of temporal receptive windows, which supports processing of dynamic information that accumulates over several time scales, such as immediate reactions vs. slowly emerging patterns in social interactions. Naturalistic stimuli have also helped elucidate how the hippocampus supports segmentation and memorization of events in day-to-day life and have afforded insights into attentional brain mechanisms underlying our ability to adopt specific perspectives during natural viewing. Further, neuroimaging studies with naturalistic stimuli have revealed the role of the default-mode network in narrative-processing and in social cognition. Finally, by robustly eliciting genuine emotions, these stimuli have helped elucidate the brain basis of both basic and social emotions apparently manifested as highly overlapping yet distinguishable patterns of brain activity.

Precedent Autonomy and Surrogate Decisionmaking After Severe Brain Injury

Patients with disorders of consciousness after severe brain injury need surrogate decision makers to guide treatment decisions on their behalf. Formal guidelines for surrogate decisionmaking generally instruct decision makers to first appeal to a patient's written advance directive, followed by making a substituted judgment of what the patient would have chosen, and lastly, to make decisions according to what seems to be in the patient's best medical interests. Substituted judgment is preferable because it is taken to preserve patient autonomy, by using a patient's past wishes and values to reconstruct what they would have chosen for themselves. In this paper, the author argues that for a certain population of patients, the standard interpretation of substituted judgment cannot ensure the preservation of patient autonomy. Patients with "covert awareness" may continue to have values and an authentic sense of self, which may differ from their past values and wishes. Accordingly, surrogate decision makers should make decisions based on how the patient is likely to experience their condition in the present, rather than their past wishes and values.

Neural Processing of Narratives: From Individual Processing to Viral Propagation

Narratives, in the form of, e.g., written stories, mouth-to-mouth accounts, audiobooks, fiction movies, and media-feeds, powerfully shape the perception of reality and widely influence human decision-making. In this review, we describe findings from recent neuroimaging studies unraveling how narratives influence the human brain, thus shaping perception, cognition, emotions, and decision-making. It appears that narrative sense-making relies on default-mode network (DMN) structures of the brain, especially precuneus. Activity in precuneus further seems to differ for fictitious vs. real narratives. Notably, high inter-subject correlation (ISC) of brain activity during narrative processing seems to predict the efficacy of a narrative. Factors that enhance the ISC of brain activity during narratives include higher levels of attention, emotional arousal, and negative emotional valence. Higher levels of attentional suspense seem to co-vary with activity in the temporoparietal junction, emotional arousal with activity in dorsal attention network, and negative emotional valence with activity in DMN. Lingering after-effects of emotional narratives have been further described in DMN, amygdala, and sensory cortical areas. Finally, inter-individual differences in personality, and cultural-background related analytical and holistic thinking styles, shape ISC of brain activity during narrative perception. Together, these findings offer promising leads for future studies elucidating the effects of narratives on the human brain, and how such effects might predict the efficacy of narratives in modulating decision-making.

From Abstract Symbols to Emotional (In-)Sights: An Eye Tracking Study on the Effects of Emotional Vignettes and Pictures

Reading is known to be a highly complex, emotion-inducing process, usually involving connected and cohesive sequences of sentences and paragraphs. However, most empirical results, especially from studies using eye tracking, are either restricted to simple linguistic materials (e.g., isolated words, single sentences) or disregard valence-driven effects. The present study addressed the need for ecologically valid stimuli by examining the emotion potential of and reading behavior in emotional vignettes, often used in applied psychological contexts and discourse comprehension. To allow for a cross-domain comparison in the area of emotion induction, negatively and positively valenced vignettes were constructed based on pre-selected emotional pictures from the Nencki Affective Picture System (NAPS; Marchewka et al., 2014). We collected ratings of perceived valence and arousal for both material groups and recorded eye movements of 42 participants during reading and picture viewing. Linear mixed-effects models were performed to analyze effects of valence (i.e., valence category, valence rating) and stimulus domain (i.e., textual, pictorial) on ratings of perceived valence and arousal, eye movements in reading, and eye movements in picture viewing. Results supported the success of our experimental manipulation: emotionally positive stimuli (i.e., vignettes, pictures) were perceived more positively and less arousing than emotionally negative ones. The cross-domain comparison indicated that vignettes are able to induce stronger valence effects than their pictorial counterparts, no differences between vignettes and pictures regarding effects on perceived arousal were found. Analyses of eye movements in reading replicated results from experiments using isolated words and sentences: perceived positive text valence attracted shorter reading times than perceived negative valence at both the supralexical and lexical level. In line with previous findings, no emotion effects on eye movements in picture viewing were found. This is the first eye tracking study reporting superior valence effects for vignettes compared to pictures and valence-specific effects on eye movements in reading at the supralexical level.

Computing the Affective-Aesthetic Potential of Literary Texts

In this paper, we compute the affective-aesthetic potential (AAP) of literary texts by using a simple sentiment analysis tool called SentiArt. In contrast to other established tools, SentiArt is based on publicly available vector space models (VSMs) and requires no emotional dictionary, thus making it applicable in any language for which VSMs have been made available (>150 so far) and avoiding issues of low coverage. In a first study, the AAP values of all words of a widely used lexical databank for German were computed and the VSM’s ability in representing concrete and more abstract semantic concepts was demonstrated. In a second study, SentiArt was used to predict ~2800 human word valence ratings and shown to have a high predictive accuracy (R2 > 0.5, p < 0.0001). A third study tested the validity of SentiArt in predicting emotional states over (narrative) time using human liking ratings from reading a story. Again, the predictive accuracy was highly significant: R2adj = 0.46, p < 0.0001, establishing the SentiArt tool as a promising candidate for lexical sentiment analyses at both the micro- and macrolevels, i.e., short and long literary materials. Possibilities and limitations of lexical VSM-based sentiment analyses of diverse complex literary texts are discussed in the light of these results.

Uncovering cortical activations of discourse comprehension and their overlaps with common large-scale neural networks

We conducted a meta-analysis of 78 task-based functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies (1976 total participants) to reveal underlying brain activations and their overlap with large-scale neural networks in the brain during general discourse comprehension and its sub-processes. We found that discourse comprehension involved a neural system consisting of widely distributed brain regions that comprised not only the bilateral perisylvian language zones, but also regions in the superior and medial frontal cortex and the medial temporal lobe. Moreover, this neural system can be categorized into several sub-systems representing various sub-processes of discourse comprehension, with the left inferior frontal gyrus and middle temporal gyrus serving as core regions across all sub-processes. At a large-scale network level, we found that discourse comprehension relied most heavily on the default network, particularly on its dorsal medial subsystem. The pattern associated with large-scale network cooperation varied according to the respective sub-processes required. Our results reveal the functional dissociation within the discourse comprehension neural system and highlight the flexible involvements of large-scale networks.

Digital Storytelling in Early Childhood: Student Illustrations Shaping Social Interactions

This study tests an instructional model designed to empower students in an early childhood classroom as emerging digital storytellers. Educators can use digital storytelling to support students' learning by encouraging them to organize and express their ideas and knowledge in an individual and meaningful way while developing voice and facility in child-computer interactions. This work also helps develop traditional communication skills, fosters collaboration, and strengthens emergent literacy practices. Students develop enhanced communication skills by learning to organize their ideas, ask questions, express opinions, and construct narratives as they interact with others and computers in the creation of digital stories. The "Emerging Digital Storytellers" instructional model focuses on social-emotional development and finding student voice through writing and digital content construction in the early childhood educational context.

Stories and the Promotion of Social Cognition

Engaging with fictional stories and the characters within them might help us better understand our real-world peers. Because stories are about characters and their interactions, understanding stories might help us to exercise our social cognitive abilities. Correlational studies with children and adults, experimental research, and neuropsychological investigations have all helped develop our understanding of how stories relate to social cognition. However, there remain a number of limitations to the current evidence, some puzzling results, and several unanswered questions that should inspire future research. This review traces multiple lines of evidence tying stories to social cognition and raises numerous critical questions for the field.

Processing Narratives Concerning Protected Values: A Cross-Cultural Investigation of Neural Correlates

Narratives are an important component of culture and play a central role in transmitting social values. Little is known, however, about how the brain of a listener/reader processes narratives. A receiver's response to narration is influenced by the narrator's framing and appeal to values. Narratives that appeal to "protected values," including core personal, national, or religious values, may be particularly effective at influencing receivers. Protected values resist compromise and are tied with identity, affective value, moral decision-making, and other aspects of social cognition. Here, we investigated the neural mechanisms underlying reactions to protected values in narratives. During fMRI scanning, we presented 78 American, Chinese, and Iranian participants with real-life stories distilled from a corpus of over 20 million weblogs. Reading these stories engaged the posterior medial, medial prefrontal, and temporo-parietal cortices. When participants believed that the protagonist was appealing to a protected value, signal in these regions was increased compared with when no protected value was perceived, possibly reflecting the intensive and iterative search required to process this material. The effect strength also varied across groups, potentially reflecting cultural differences in the degree of concern for protected values.

Evoking and Measuring Identification with Narrative Characters - A Linguistic Cues Framework

Current research on identification with narrative characters poses two problems. First, although identification is seen as a dynamic process of which the intensity varies during reading, it is usually measured by means of post-reading questionnaires containing self-report items. Second, it is not clear which linguistic characteristics evoke identification. The present paper proposes that an interdisciplinary framework allows for more precise manipulations and measurements of identification, which will ultimately advance our understanding of the antecedents and nature of this process. The central hypothesis of our Linguistic Cues Framework is that identification with a narrative character is a multidimensional experience for which different dimensions are evoked by different linguistic cues. The first part of the paper presents a literature review on identification, resulting in a renewed conceptualization of identification which distinguishes six dimensions: a spatiotemporal, a perceptual, a cognitive, a moral, an emotional, and an embodied dimension. The second part argues that each of these dimensions is influenced by specific linguistic cues which represent various aspects of the narrative character’s perspective. The proposed relations between linguistic cues and identification dimensions are specified in six propositions. The third part discusses what psychological and neurocognitive methods enable the measurement of the various identification dimensions in order to test the propositions. By establishing explicit connections between the linguistic characteristics of narratives and readers’ physical, psychological, and neurocognitive responses to narratives, this paper develops a research agenda for future empirical research on identification with narrative characters.

Context matters: Anterior and posterior cortical midline responses to sad movie scenes

Narrative movies can create powerful emotional responses. While recent research has advanced the understanding of neural networks involved in immersive movie viewing, their modulation within a movie's dynamic context remains inconclusive. In this study, 24 healthy participants passively watched sad scene climaxes taken from 24 romantic comedies, while brain activity was measured using functional magnetic resonance (fMRI). To study effects of context, the sad scene climaxes were presented with either coherent scene context, replaced non-coherent context or without context. In a second viewing, the same clips were rated continuously for sadness. The ratings varied over time with peaks of experienced sadness within the assumed climax intervals. Activations in anterior and posterior cortical midline regions increased if presented with both coherent and replaced context, while activation in the temporal gyri decreased. This difference was more pronounced for the coherent context condition. Psycho-Physiological interactions (PPI) analyses showed a context-dependent coupling of midline regions with occipital visual and sub-cortical reward regions. Our results demonstrate the pivotal role of midline structures and their interaction with perceptual and reward areas in processing contextually embedded socio-emotional information in movies.

Covert narrative capacity: Mental life in patients thought to lack consciousness

Despite the apparent absence of external signs of consciousness, a significant proportion of behaviorally nonresponsive patients can respond to commands by willfully modulating their brain activity. However, little is known about the mental life of these patients. We discuss a recent innovative approach, which sheds light on the preserved cognitive capacities of these patients, including executive function, theory of mind, and the experience of affective states. This research represents a fundamental shift in our understanding of these patients, and has important implications for both their continued treatment and care. Moreover, this research marks out avenues for future inquiry into the residual cognitive capacities of these patients.

On Elementary Affective Decisions: To Like Or Not to Like, That Is the Question

Perhaps the most ubiquitous and basic affective decision of daily life is deciding whether we like or dislike something/somebody, or, in terms of psychological emotion theories, whether the object/subject has positive or negative valence. Indeed, people constantly make such liking decisions within a glimpse and, importantly, often without expecting any obvious benefit or knowing the exact reasons for their judgment. In this paper, we review research on such elementary affective decisions (EADs) that entail no direct overt reward with a special focus on Neurocognitive Poetics and discuss methods and models for investigating the neuronal and cognitive-affective bases of EADs to verbal materials with differing degrees of complexity. In line with evolutionary and appraisal theories of (aesthetic) emotions and data from recent neurocognitive studies, the results of a decision tree modeling approach simulating EADs to single words suggest that a main driving force behind EADs is the extent to which such high-dimensional stimuli are associated with the “basic” emotions joy/happiness and disgust.

Silent Reading Fluency and Comprehension in Bilingual Children

This paper focuses on reading fluency by bilingual primary school students, and the relation of text fluency to their reading comprehension. Group differences were examined in a cross-sectional design across the age range when fluency is posed to shift from word-level to text-level. One hundred five bilingual children from primary grades 3, 4, and 5 were assessed for English word reading and decoding fluency, phonological awareness, rapid symbol naming, and oral language proficiency with standardized measures. These skills were correlated with their silent reading fluency on a self-paced story reading task. Text fluency was quantified using non-linear analytic methods: recurrence quantification and fractal analyses. Findings indicate that more fluent text reading appeared by grade 4, similar to monolingual findings, and that different aspects of fluency characterized passage reading performance at different grade levels. Text fluency and oral language proficiency emerged as significant predictors of reading comprehension.

The Use of "Literary Fiction" to Promote Mentalizing Ability

Empathy is a multidimensional process that incorporates both mentalizing and emotional sharing dimensions. Empathic competencies are important for creating interpersonal relationships with other people and developing adequate social behaviour. The lack of these social components also leads to isolation and exclusion in healthy populations. However, few studies have investigated how to improve these social skills. In a recent study, Kidd and Castano (2013) found that reading literary fiction increases mentalizing ability and may change how people think about other people’s emotions and mental states. The aim of our study was to evaluate the effects of reading literary fiction, compared to nonfiction and science fiction, on empathic abilities. Compared to previous studies, we used a larger variety of empathy measures and utilized a pre and post-test design. In all, 214 healthy participants were randomly assigned to read a book representative of one of three literary genres (literary fiction, nonfiction, science fiction). Participants were assessed before and after the reading phase using mentalizing and emotional sharing tests, according to Zaki and Ochsner’ s (2012) model. Comparisons of sociodemographic, mentalizing, and emotional sharing variables across conditions were conducted using ANOVA. Our results showed that after the reading phase, the literary fiction group showed improvement in mentalizing abilities, but there was no discernible effect on emotional sharing abilities. Our study showed that the reading processes can promote mentalizing abilities. These results may set important goals for future low-cost rehabilitation protocols for several disorders in which the mentalizing deficit is considered central to the disease, such as Autism Spectrum Disorders and Schizophrenia.

Human, Nature, Dynamism: The Effects of Content and Movement Perception on Brain Activations during the Aesthetic Judgment of Representational Paintings

Movement perception and its role in aesthetic experience have been often studied, within empirical aesthetics, in relation to the human body. No such specificity has been defined in neuroimaging studies with respect to contents lacking a human form. The aim of this work was to explore, through functional magnetic imaging (f MRI), how perceived movement is processed during the aesthetic judgment of paintings using two types of content: human subjects and scenes of nature. Participants, untutored in the arts, were shown the stimuli and asked to make aesthetic judgments. Additionally, they were instructed to observe the paintings and to rate their perceived movement in separate blocks. Observation highlighted spontaneous processes associated with aesthetic experience, whereas movement judgment outlined activations specifically related to movement processing. The ratings recorded during aesthetic judgment revealed that nature scenes received higher scored than human content paintings. The imaging data showed similar activation, relative to baseline, for all stimuli in the three tasks, including activation of occipito-temporal areas, posterior parietal, and premotor cortices. Contrast analyses within aesthetic judgment task showed that human content activated, relative to nature, precuneus, fusiform gyrus, and posterior temporal areas, whose activation was prominent for dynamic human paintings. In contrast, nature scenes activated, relative to human stimuli, occipital and posterior parietal cortex/precuneus, involved in visuospatial exploration and pragmatic coding of movement, as well as central insula. Static nature paintings further activated, relative to dynamic nature stimuli, central and posterior insula. Besides insular activation, which was specific for aesthetic judgment, we found a large overlap in the activation pattern characterizing each stimulus dimension (content and dynamism) across observation, aesthetic judgment, and movement judgment tasks. These findings support the idea that the aesthetic evaluation of artworks depicting both human subjects and nature scenes involves a motor component, and that the associated neural processes occur quite spontaneously in the viewer. Furthermore, considering the functional roles of posterior and central insula, we suggest that nature paintings may evoke aesthetic processes requiring an additional proprioceptive and sensori-motor component implemented by “motor accessibility” to the represented scenario, which is needed to judge the aesthetic value of the observed painting.

Music and literature: are there shared empathy and predictive mechanisms underlying their affective impact?

It has been suggested that music and language had a shared evolutionary precursor before becoming mainly responsible for the communication of emotive and referential meaning respectively. However, emphasis on potential differences between music and language may discourage a consideration of the commonalities that music and literature share. Indeed, one possibility is that common mechanisms underlie their affective impact, and the current paper carefully reviews relevant neuroscientific findings to examine such a prospect. First and foremost, it will be demonstrated that considerable evidence of a common role of empathy and predictive processes now exists for the two domains. However, it will also be noted that an important open question remains: namely, whether the mechanisms underlying the subjective experience of uncertainty differ between the two domains with respect to recruitment of phylogenetically ancient emotion areas. It will be concluded that a comparative approach may not only help to reveal general mechanisms underlying our responses to music and literature, but may also help us better understand any idiosyncrasies in their capacity for affective impact.

The emotion potential of simple sentences: additive or interactive effects of nouns and adjectives?

The vast majority of studies on affective processes in reading focus on single words. The most robust finding is a processing advantage for positively valenced words, which has been replicated in the rare studies investigating effects of affective features of words during sentence or story comprehension. Here we were interested in how the different valences of words in a sentence influence its processing and supralexical affective evaluation. Using a sentence verification task we investigated how comprehension of simple declarative sentences containing a noun and an adjective depends on the valences of both words. The results are in line with the assumed general processing advantage for positive words. We also observed a clear interaction effect, as can be expected from the affective priming literature: sentences with emotionally congruent words (e.g., The grandpa is clever) were verified faster than sentences containing emotionally incongruent words (e.g., The grandpa is lonely). The priming effect was most prominent for sentences with positive words suggesting that both, early processing as well as later meaning integration and situation model construction, is modulated by affective processing. In a second rating task we investigated how the emotion potential of supralexical units depends on word valence. The simplest hypothesis predicts that the supralexical affective structure is a linear combination of the valences of the nouns and adjectives (Bestgen, 1994). Overall, our results do not support this: The observed clear interaction effect on ratings indicate that especially negative adjectives dominated supralexical evaluation, i.e., a sort of negativity bias in sentence evaluation. Future models of sentence processing thus should take interactive affective effects into account.

Neurocognitive poetics: methods and models for investigating the neuronal and cognitive-affective bases of literature reception

A long tradition of research including classical rhetoric, esthetics and poetics theory, formalism and structuralism, as well as current perspectives in (neuro)cognitive poetics has investigated structural and functional aspects of literature reception. Despite a wealth of literature published in specialized journals like Poetics, however, still little is known about how the brain processes and creates literary and poetic texts. Still, such stimulus material might be suited better than other genres for demonstrating the complexities with which our brain constructs the world in and around us, because it unifies thought and language, music and imagery in a clear, manageable way, most often with play, pleasure, and emotion (Schrott and Jacobs, 2011). In this paper, I discuss methods and models for investigating the neuronal and cognitive-affective bases of literary reading together with pertinent results from studies on poetics, text processing, emotion, or neuroaesthetics, and outline current challenges and future perspectives.