The power of emotional valence-from cognitive to affective processes in reading

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.

Psychological effects of reading: the role of nostalgia in re-reading favorite books

Nostalgia evoked through various experiences (e.g., scents, music) has been shown to enhance emotional well-being and reduce social pain. We propose that reading a familiar book similarly can elicit nostalgia, and provide emotional benefits through narrative transportation beyond that of reading a new book. We tested the relationship between reading new versus familiar books, nostalgia, narrative transportation, and indices of social connectedness. Participants were randomly assigned to re-read a favorite novel, read a new novel of interest, or read a set of newspaper articles. Re-reading elicited greater nostalgia and social connectedness than reading a new novel or newspaper. Narrative transportation and nostalgia fully mediated the effect of reading condition on social connectedness. We discuss implications for our understanding homeostatic nature of nostalgia and mental transportation.

Brain decoding of spontaneous thought: Predictive modeling of self-relevance and valence using personal narratives

The contents and dynamics of spontaneous thought are important factors for personality traits and mental health. However, assessing spontaneous thoughts is challenging due to their unconstrained nature, and directing participants' attention to report their thoughts may fundamentally alter them. Here, we aimed to decode two key content dimensions of spontaneous thought-self-relevance and valence-directly from brain activity. To train functional MRI-based predictive models, we used individually generated personal stories as stimuli in a story-reading task to mimic narrative-like spontaneous thoughts (n = 49). We then tested these models on multiple test datasets (total n = 199). The default mode, ventral attention, and frontoparietal networks played key roles in the predictions, with the anterior insula and midcingulate cortex contributing to self-relevance prediction and the left temporoparietal junction and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex contributing to valence prediction. Overall, this study presents brain models of internal thoughts and emotions, highlighting the potential for the brain decoding of spontaneous thought.

The Attachment Mapping Protocol (AMP): An Assessment and Treatment Tool for General Psychotherapy, Systemic Family Therapy and Multifaith Spiritual Care

This paper introduces the Attachment Mapping Protocol (AMP), which is an assessment and treatment tool for use in individual psychotherapy, systemic family therapy and multifaith spiritual care, using a bio-psycho-social-spiritual model of care. Attachment theory has a long and significant history in psychology, with an evolving relationship within the above clinical domains. A central aim of this paper will be to recognize and affirm the extension of attachment theory beyond the traditional parameters of nascent parental, guardianship bonds and individual, developmental psychology, to reveal a much broader spectrum of valid attachment considerations for mental health and spiritual well-being. A case study will be applied to the interviewing instrument to demonstrate its utility for broadening assessment beyond attachment figures to include surrogate attachments of other persons, places and things. A model of spiritual discernment derived from the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola will undergird this larger worldview of attachment considerations.

Reading about minds: The social-cognitive potential of narratives

It is often argued that narratives improve social cognition, either by appealing to social-cognitive abilities as we engage with the story world and its characters, or by conveying social knowledge. Empirical studies have found support for both a correlational and a causal link between exposure to (literary, fictional) narratives and social cognition. However, a series of failed replications has cast doubt on the robustness of these claims. Here, we review the existing empirical literature and identify open questions and challenges. An important conclusion of the review is that previous research has given too little consideration to the diversity of narratives, readers, and social-cognitive processes involved in the social-cognitive potential of narratives. We therefore establish a research agenda, proposing that future research should focus on (1) the specific text characteristics that drive the social-cognitive potential of narratives, (2) the individual differences between readers with respect to their sensitivity to this potential, and (3) the various aspects of social cognition that are potentially affected by reading narratives. Our recommendations can guide the design of future studies that will help us understand how, for whom, and in what respect exposure to narratives can advantage social cognition.

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.

Fuzzy Lexical Representations in Adult Second Language Speakers

We propose the fuzzy lexical representations (FLRs) hypothesis that regards fuzziness as a core property of nonnative (L2) lexical representations (LRs). Fuzziness refers to imprecise encoding at different levels of LRs and interacts with input frequency during lexical processing and learning in adult L2 speakers. The FLR hypothesis primarily focuses on the encoding of spoken L2 words. We discuss the causes of fuzzy encoding of phonological form and meaning as well as fuzzy form-meaning mappings and the consequences of fuzzy encoding for word storage and retrieval. A central factor contributing to the fuzziness of L2 LRs is the fact that the L2 lexicon is acquired when the L1 lexicon is already in place. There are two immediate consequences of such sequential learning. First, L2 phonological categorization difficulties lead to fuzzy phonological form encoding. Second, the acquisition of L2 word forms subsequently to their meanings, which had already been acquired together with the L1 word forms, leads to weak L2 form-meaning mappings. The FLR hypothesis accounts for a range of phenomena observed in L2 lexical processing, including lexical confusions, slow lexical access, retrieval of incorrect lexical entries, weak lexical competition, reliance on sublexical rather than lexical heuristics in word recognition, the precedence of word form over meaning, and the prominence of detailed, even if imprecisely encoded, information about LRs in episodic memory. The main claim of the FLR hypothesis – that the quality of lexical encoding is a product of a complex interplay between fuzziness and input frequency – can contribute to increasing the efficiency of the existing models of LRs and lexical access.

Reading Minds, Reading Stories: Social-Cognitive Abilities Affect the Linguistic Processing of Narrative Viewpoint

Although various studies have shown that narrative reading draws on social-cognitive abilities, not much is known about the precise aspects of narrative processing that engage these abilities. We hypothesized that the linguistic processing of narrative viewpoint—expressed by elements that provide access to the inner world of characters—might play an important role in engaging social-cognitive abilities. Using eye tracking, we studied the effect of lexical markers of perceptual, cognitive, and emotional viewpoint on eye movements during reading of a 5,000-word narrative. Next, we investigated how this relationship was modulated by individual differences in social-cognitive abilities. Our results show diverging patterns of eye movements for perceptual viewpoint markers on the one hand, and cognitive and emotional viewpoint markers on the other. Whereas the former are processed relatively fast compared to non-viewpoint markers, the latter are processed relatively slow. Moreover, we found that social-cognitive abilities impacted the processing of words in general, and of perceptual and cognitive viewpoint markers in particular, such that both perspective-taking abilities and self-reported perspective-taking traits facilitated the processing of these markers. All in all, our study extends earlier findings that social cognition is of importance for story reading, showing that individual differences in social-cognitive abilities are related to the linguistic processing of narrative viewpoint.

Distinct functional and structural connections predict crystallised and fluid cognition in healthy adults

White matter pathways between neurons facilitate neuronal coactivation patterns in the brain. Insight into how these structural and functional connections underlie complex cognitive functions provides an important foundation with which to delineate disease‐related changes in cognitive functioning. Here, we integrate neuroimaging, connectomics, and machine learning approaches to explore how functional and structural brain connectivity relate to cognition. Specifically, we evaluate the extent to which functional and structural connectivity predict individual crystallised and fluid cognitive abilities in 415 unrelated healthy young adults (202 females) from the Human Connectome Project. We report three main findings. First, we demonstrate functional connectivity is more predictive of cognitive scores than structural connectivity, and, furthermore, integrating the two modalities does not increase explained variance. Second, we show the quality of cognitive prediction from connectome measures is influenced by the choice of grey matter parcellation, and, possibly, how that parcellation is derived. Third, we find that distinct functional and structural connections predict crystallised and fluid abilities. Taken together, our results suggest that functional and structural connectivity have unique relationships with crystallised and fluid cognition and, furthermore, studying both modalities provides a more comprehensive insight into the neural correlates of cognition.

Effects of Rivastigmine on Brain Functional Networks in Patients With Alzheimer Disease Based on the Graph Theory

OBJECTIVE

The aim of this study was to explore the effect of rivastigmine on brain function in Alzheimer disease (AD) by analyzing brain functional network based on the graph theory.

METHODS

We enrolled 9 patients with mild to moderate AD who received rivastigmine treatment and 9 healthy controls (HC). Subsequently, we used resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging data to establish the whole-brain functional network using a graph theory-based analysis. Furthermore, we compared systemic and local network indicators between pre- and posttreatment.

RESULTS

Patients with AD exhibited a posttreatment increase in the Mini-Mental State Examination scores and a decrease in the Alzheimer's Disease Assessment Scale cognitive subscale scores and activities of daily living. The systemic network for HC and patients with AD had good pre- and posttreatment clustering coefficients. There was no change in the Cp, Lp, Gamma, Lambda, and Sigma in patients with AD. There were no significant between-group differences in the pre- and posttreatment systemic network measures. Regarding the regional network, patients with AD showed increased betweenness centrality in the bilateral caudate nucleus and right superior temporal pole after treatment with rivastigmine. However, there was no between-group difference in the pre- and posttreatment betweenness centrality of these regions. There were no significant correlations between regional network measure changes and clinical score alterations in patients with AD.

CONCLUSIONS

There are similar systemic network properties between patients with AD and HC. Rivastigmine cannot alter systemic network attributes in patients with AD. However, it improves the topological properties of regional networks and between-node information transmission in patients with AD.

Affective and psycholinguistic norms for German conceptual metaphors (COMETA)

Figurative expressions have been shown to play a special role in evoking affective responses, as compared to their literal counterparts. This study provides the first database of conceptual metaphors that includes ratings of affective properties beyond psycholinguistic properties. To allow for the investigation of natural reading processes, 64 natural stories were created, half of which contained two or three conceptual metaphors that relied on the same mapping, whereas the other half contained the metaphors' literal counterparts. To allow for tighter control and manipulation of the different properties, 120 isolated sentences were also created, half of which contained one metaphorical word, which was replaced by its literal rendering in the other half. All stimuli were rated for emotional valence, arousal, imageability, and metaphoricity, and the pairs of metaphorical and literal stimuli were rated for their similarity in meaning. A measure of complexity was determined and computed. The stories were also rated for naturalness and understandability, and the sentences for familiarity. Differences between the metaphorical and literal stimuli and relationships between the affective and psycholinguistic variables were explored and are discussed in light of extant empirical research. In a nutshell, the metaphorical stimuli were rated as being higher in emotional arousal and easier to imagine than their literal counterparts, thus confirming a role of metaphor in evoking emotion and in activating sensorimotor representations. Affective variables showed the typical U-shaped relationship consistently found in word databases, whereby increasingly positive and negative valence is associated with higher arousal. Finally, interesting differences between the stories and sentences were observed.

An Electrophysiological Abstractness Effect for Metaphorical Meaning Making

Neuroimaging studies show that metaphors activate sensorimotor areas. These findings were interpreted as metaphors contributing to conceptual thought by mapping concrete, somatosensory information onto abstract ideas. But is sensorimotor information a necessary constituent of figurative meaning? The present study employed event-related potentials (ERPs) in a divided visual field paradigm with healthy adults to explore the role of sensorimotor feature processing in the comprehension of novel metaphors via the electrophysiological concreteness effect. Participants read French, novel adjective-noun expressions that were either metaphorical (“fat sentence”) or literal (“fat hip”). While literal expressions evoked a typical concreteness effect, an enhanced frontal negativity during right hemisphere (RH) as opposed to left hemisphere (LH) presentation, metaphors showed no such sign of sensorimotor feature processing. Relative to literals, they evoked a sustained frontal negativity during LH presentation and similar amplitudes during RH presentation, but both of these effects were the greater the more abstract the metaphors were. It is the first time such an electrophysiological abstractness effect is reported, just the opposite of a concreteness effect. It is particularly noteworthy that ERPs evoked by metaphors were not contingent on figurativeness, novelty, meaningfulness, imageability, emotional valence, or arousal, only on abstractness. When compared with similarly novel literal expressions, metaphors did not evoke a typical N400 and did not activate the RH either. The findings shed new light on the neurocognitive machinery of figurative meaning construction, pervasive in everyday communication. Contrary to embodied cognition, the conceptual system might be organized around abstract representations and not sensorimotor information, even for lush, metaphorical language.

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.

Limitations of Standard Accessible Captioning of Sounds and Music for Deaf and Hard of Hearing People: An EEG Study

Captioning is the process of transcribing speech and acoustical information into text to help deaf and hard of hearing people accessing to the auditory track of audiovisual media. In addition to the verbal transcription, it includes information such as sound effects, speaker identification, or music tagging. However, it just takes into account a limited spectrum of the whole acoustic information available in the soundtrack, and hence, an important amount of emotional information is lost when attending just to the normative compliant captions. In this article, it is shown, by means of behavioral and EEG measurements, how emotional information related to sounds and music used by the creator in the audiovisual work is perceived differently by normal hearing group and hearing disabled group when applying standard captioning. Audio and captions activate similar processing areas, respectively, in each group, although not with the same intensity. Moreover, captions require higher activation of voluntary attentional circuits, as well as language-related areas. Captions transcribing musical information increase attentional activity, instead of emotional processing.

Sentiment Analysis for Words and Fiction Characters From the Perspective of Computational (Neuro-)Poetics

Two computational studies provide different sentiment analyses for text segments (e.g., "fearful" passages) and figures (e.g., "Voldemort") from the Harry Potter books (Rowling, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2007) based on a novel simple tool called SentiArt. The tool uses vector space models together with theory-guided, empirically validated label lists to compute the valence of each word in a text by locating its position in a 2d emotion potential space spanned by the words of the vector space model. After testing the tool's accuracy with empirical data from a neurocognitive poetics study, it was applied to compute emotional figure and personality profiles (inspired by the so-called "big five" personality theory) for main characters from the book series. The results of comparative analyses using different machine-learning classifiers (e.g., AdaBoost, Neural Net) show that SentiArt performs very well in predicting the emotion potential of text passages. It also produces plausible predictions regarding the emotional and personality profile of fiction characters which are correctly identified on the basis of eight character features, and it achieves a good cross-validation accuracy in classifying 100 figures into "good" vs. "bad" ones. The results are discussed with regard to potential applications of SentiArt in digital literary, applied reading and neurocognitive poetics studies such as the quantification of the hybrid hero potential of figures.

Idiomatic expressions evoke stronger emotional responses in the brain than literal sentences

Recent neuroscientific research shows that metaphors engage readers at the emotional level more strongly than literal expressions. What still remains unclear is what makes metaphors more engaging, and whether this generalises to all figurative expressions, no matter how conventionalised they are. This fMRI study aimed to investigate whether idiomatic expressions - the least creative part of figurative language - indeed trigger a higher affective resonance than literal expressions, and to explore possible interactions between activation in emotion-relevant neural structures and regions associated with figurative language processing. Participants silently read for comprehension a set of emotionally positive, negative and neutral idioms embedded in short sentences, and similarly valenced literal sentences. As in studies on metaphors, we found enhanced activation of the left inferior frontal gyrus and left amygdala in response to idioms, indexing stronger recruitment of executive control functions and enhanced emotional engagement, respectively. This suggests that the comprehension of even highly conventionalised and familiar figurative expressions, namely idioms, recruits regions involved in emotional processing. Furthermore, increased activation of the IFG interacted positively with activation in the amygdala, suggesting that the stronger cognitive engagement driven by idioms may in turn be coupled with stronger involvement at the emotional level.

Effects of Valence and Emotional Intensity on the Comprehension and Memorization of Texts

In the present study, we independently manipulated valence (positive, negative, or neutral) and emotional intensity (low, medium, or high), asking what impact they have on text comprehension (via surface, paraphrase, and inference questions) and memorization (via Remember/Know test) in adults. Results show that emotional contents, including valence and intensity affects comprehension. Emotional valence had a significant effect on text comprehension, with higher scores for positive and neutral texts than for negative ones. Participants scored higher on the surface questions for positive texts and on the inference questions for negative texts, with equivalent scores for paraphrase questions. Regarding emotional intensity, medium intensity generally fostered better comprehension of both positive and negative texts. High emotional intensity is beneficial for positively valenced texts, but hinders the understanding of negatively valenced ones. Regarding memorization, participants recalled more emotional words than neutral ones, and more words for positive texts than for either negative or neutral ones. In conclusion, our results show that emotions play an important role and improve the processing of information.

Encoding Praise and Criticism During Social Evaluation Alters Interactive Responses in the Mentalizing and Affective Learning Networks

Verbal communication with evaluative characters of different emotional valence has a considerable impact on the extent to which social relations are facilitated or undermined. Here using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we investigated how the brain acts in response to social praise and criticism, leading to differential affective judgments. We engaged thirty men and women in a task associating sex-balanced, neutral faces with praising or criticizing comments targeting others or objects. A whole-brain analysis revealed that criticism as compared to praise enhanced the activation in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), particularly its dorsal portion, whereas the right amygdala displayed an opposite pattern of changes. Comments on others relative to objects increased the reactivity in the left posterior superior temporal sulcus and posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) such that both praise and criticism of others produced stronger activation in these two regions than their object-targeted counterparts. The interaction of valence and target was identified in the mPFC with greater reactivity in the contrasts of criticism vs. praise in the social context and others- vs. object-targeted criticism. Comments also modulated the functional connectivity of prior activated regions with the left temporoparietal junction, bilateral caudate and left PCC/precuneus showing reduced connectivity in response to social criticism but greatly strengthened connectivity for social praise as compared to non-social counterparts. These neural effects subsequently led to altered likeability ratings for the faces. Neither behavioral nor neural effects observed were influenced by the gender of participants. Taken together, our findings suggest a fundamental interactive role of the mentalizing and affective learning networks in differential encoding of individuals associated with praising or criticizing others, leading to learning of valenced traits and subsequent approach or avoidance responses in social interactions.

The Fictive Brain: Neurocognitive Correlates of Engagement in Literature

Fiction is vital to our being. Many people enjoy engaging with fiction every day. Here we focus on literary reading as 1 instance of fiction consumption from a cognitive neuroscience perspective. The brain processes which play a role in the mental construction of fiction worlds and the related engagement with fictional characters, remain largely unknown. The authors discuss the neurocognitive poetics model ( Jacobs, 2015a ) of literary reading specifying the likely neuronal correlates of several key processes in literary reading, namely inference and situation model building, immersion, mental simulation and imagery, figurative language and style, and the issue of distinguishing fact from fiction. An overview of recent work on these key processes is followed by a discussion of methodological challenges in studying the brain bases of fiction processing.

The Temporal Pole Top-Down Modulates the Ventral Visual Stream During Social Cognition

The temporal pole (TP) has been associated with diverse functions of social cognition and emotion processing. Although the underlying mechanism remains elusive, one possibility is that TP acts as domain-general hub integrating socioemotional information. To test this, 26 participants were presented with 60 empathy-evoking film clips during fMRI scanning. The film clips were preceded by a linguistic sad or neutral context and half of the clips were accompanied by sad music. In line with its hypothesized role, TP was involved in the processing of sad context and furthermore tracked participants' empathic concern. To examine the neuromodulatory impact of TP, we applied nonlinear dynamic causal modeling to a multisensory integration network from previous work consisting of superior temporal gyrus (STG), fusiform gyrus (FG), and amygdala, which was extended by an additional node in the TP. Bayesian model comparison revealed a gating of STG and TP on fusiform-amygdalar coupling and an increase of TP to FG connectivity during the integration of contextual information. Moreover, these backward projections were strengthened by emotional music. The findings indicate that during social cognition, TP integrates information from different modalities and top-down modulates lower-level perceptual areas in the ventral visual stream as a function of integration demands.

How context features modulate the involvement of the working memory system during discourse comprehension

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we investigated the effects of context features on the involvement of the working memory (WM) system during discourse comprehension. During the fMRI scan, participants were asked to read two-sentence discourses in which the topic of the second sentence was either maintained, or was shifted from, the topic of the first. Changes in the level of coherence between the two sentences as well as context length were also investigated across discourse items. The WM system was identified with a verbal N-back task. Analysis of the reading comprehension task revealed that within the WM system, stronger activation in the left inferior frontal gyrus corresponded with increased bridging coherence demands between sentences, while greater activation in the left inferior and middle frontal gyri, bilateral superior frontal gyri, and bilateral inferior parietal lobules corresponded with increased context length. Topic variation showed no effect on activation of the WM system. These results provide new insights into understanding how different levels of context features modulate activation of the subcomponents of the WM system and indicate a role for the left inferior frontal gyrus as a core component of the WM system supporting discourse processing.

Expressive intent, ambiguity, and aesthetic experiences of music and poetry

A growing number of studies are investigating the way that aesthetic experiences are generated across different media. Empathy with a perceived human artist has been suggested as a common mechanism [1]. In this study, people heard 30 s excerpts of ambiguous music and poetry preceded by neutral, positively valenced, or negatively valenced information about the composer's or author's intent. The information influenced their perception of the excerpts-excerpts paired with positive intent information were perceived as happier and excerpts paired with negative intent information were perceived as sadder (although across intent conditions, musical excerpts were perceived as happier than poetry excerpts). Moreover, the information modulated the aesthetic experience of the excerpts in different ways for the different excerpt types: positive intent information increased enjoyment and the degree to which people found the musical excerpts to be moving, but negative intent information increased these qualities for poetry. Additionally, positive intent information was judged to better match musical excerpts and negative intent information to better match poetic excerpts. These results suggest that empathy with a perceived human artist is indeed an important shared factor across experiences of music and poetry, but that other mechanisms distinguish the generation of aesthetic appreciation between these two media.

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.

When emotions are expressed figuratively: Psycholinguistic and Affective Norms of 619 Idioms for German (PANIG)

Despite flourishing research on the relationship between emotion and literal language, and despite the pervasiveness of figurative expressions in communication, the role of figurative language in conveying affect has been underinvestigated. This study provides affective and psycholinguistic norms for 619 German idiomatic expressions and explores the relationships between affective and psycholinguistic idiom properties. German native speakers rated each idiom for emotional valence, arousal, familiarity, semantic transparency, figurativeness, and concreteness. They also described the figurative meaning of each idiom and rated how confident they were about the attributed meaning. The results showed that idioms rated high in valence were also rated high in arousal. Negative idioms were rated as more arousing than positive ones, in line with results from single words. Furthermore, arousal correlated positively with figurativeness (supporting the idea that figurative expressions are more emotionally engaging than literal expressions) and with concreteness and semantic transparency. This suggests that idioms may convey a more direct reference to sensory representations, mediated by the meanings of their constituting words. Arousal correlated positively with familiarity. In addition, positive idioms were rated as more familiar than negative idioms. Finally, idioms without a literal counterpart were rated as more emotionally valenced and arousing than idioms with a literal counterpart. Although the meanings of ambiguous idioms were less correctly defined than those of unambiguous idioms, ambiguous idioms were rated as more concrete than unambiguous ones. We also discuss the relationships between the various psycholinguistic variables characterizing idioms, with reference to the literature on idiom structure and processing.

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.

The Berlin Affective Word List for Children (kidBAWL): Exploring Processing of Affective Lexical Semantics in the Visual and Auditory Modalities

While research on affective word processing in adults witnesses increasing interest, the present paper looks at another group of participants that have been neglected so far: pupils (age range: 6-12 years). Introducing a variant of the Berlin Affective Wordlist (BAWL) especially adapted for children of that age group, the "kidBAWL," we examined to what extent pupils process affective lexical semantics similarly to adults. In three experiments using rating and valence decision tasks in both the visual and auditory modality, it was established that children show the two ubiquitous phenomena observed in adults with emotional word material: the asymmetric U-shaped function relating valence to arousal ratings, and the inversely U-shaped function relating response times to valence decision latencies. The results for both modalities show large structural similarities between pupil and adult data (taken from previous studies) indicating that in the present age range, the affective lexicon and the dynamic interplay between language and emotion is already well-developed. Differential effects show that younger children tend to choose less extreme ratings than older children and that rating latencies decrease with age. Overall, our study should help to develop more realistic models of word recognition and reading that include affective processes and offer a methodology for exploring the roots of pleasant literary experiences and ludic reading.

Caring About Dostoyevsky: The Untapped Potential of Studying Literature

Should cognitive scientists and neuroscientists care about Dostoyevsky? Engaging with fiction is a natural and rich behavior, providing a unique window onto the mind and brain, particularly for mental simulation, emotion, empathy, and immersion. With advances in analysis techniques, it is time that cognitive scientists and neuroscientists embrace literature and fiction.

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.

The neuroaesthetics of prose fiction: pitfalls, parameters and prospects

There is a paucity of neuroaesthetic studies on prose fiction. This is in contrast to the very many impressive studies that have been conducted in recent times on the neuroaesthetics of sister arts such as painting, music and dance. Why might this be the case, what are its causes and, of greatest importance, how can it best be resolved? In this article, the pitfalls, parameters and prospects of a neuroaesthetics of prose fiction will be explored. The article itself is part critical review, part methodological proposal and part opinion paper. Its aim is simple: to stimulate, excite and energize thinking in the discipline as to how prose fiction might be fully integrated in the canon of neuroaesthetics and to point to opportunities where neuroimaging studies on literary discourse processing might be conducted in collaborative work bringing humanists and scientists together.

Fiction feelings in Harry Potter: haemodynamic response in the mid-cingulate cortex correlates with immersive reading experience

Immersion in reading, described as a feeling of 'getting lost in a book', is a ubiquitous phenomenon widely appreciated by readers. However, it has been largely ignored in cognitive neuroscience. According to the fiction feeling hypothesis, narratives with emotional contents invite readers more to be empathic with the protagonists and thus engage the affective empathy network of the brain, the anterior insula and mid-cingulate cortex, than do stories with neutral contents. To test the hypothesis, we presented participants with text passages from the Harry Potter series in a functional MRI experiment and collected post-hoc immersion ratings, comparing the neural correlates of passage mean immersion ratings when reading fear-inducing versus neutral contents. Results for the conjunction contrast of baseline brain activity of reading irrespective of emotional content against baseline were in line with previous studies on text comprehension. In line with the fiction feeling hypothesis, immersion ratings were significantly higher for fear-inducing than for neutral passages, and activity in the mid-cingulate cortex correlated more strongly with immersion ratings of fear-inducing than of neutral passages. Descriptions of protagonists' pain or personal distress featured in the fear-inducing passages apparently caused increasing involvement of the core structure of pain and affective empathy the more readers immersed in the text. The predominant locus of effects in the mid-cingulate cortex seems to reflect that the immersive experience was particularly facilitated by the motor component of affective empathy for our stimuli from the Harry Potter series featuring particularly vivid descriptions of the behavioural aspects of emotion.

10 years of BAWLing into affective and aesthetic processes in reading: what are the echoes?

Reading is not only "cold" information processing, but involves affective and aesthetic processes that go far beyond what current models of word recognition, sentence processing, or text comprehension can explain. To investigate such "hot" reading processes, standardized instruments that quantify both psycholinguistic and emotional variables at the sublexical, lexical, inter-, and supralexical levels (e.g., phonological iconicity, word valence, arousal-span, or passage suspense) are necessary. One such instrument, the Berlin Affective Word List (BAWL) has been used in over 50 published studies demonstrating effects of lexical emotional variables on all relevant processing levels (experiential, behavioral, neuronal). In this paper, we first present new data from several BAWL studies. Together, these studies examine various views on affective effects in reading arising from dimensional (e.g., valence) and discrete emotion features (e.g., happiness), or embodied cognition features like smelling. Second, we extend our investigation of the complex issue of affective word processing to words characterized by a mixture of affects. These words entail positive and negative valence, and/or features making them beautiful or ugly. Finally, we discuss tentative neurocognitive models of affective word processing in the light of the present results, raising new issues for future studies.

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

Stories can elicit powerful emotions. A key emotional response to narrative plots (e.g., novels, movies, etc.) is suspense. Suspense appears to build on basic aspects of human cognition such as processes of expectation, anticipation, and prediction. However, the neural processes underlying emotional experiences of suspense have not been previously investigated. We acquired functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data while participants read a suspenseful literary text (E.T.A. Hoffmann's “The Sandman”) subdivided into short text passages. Individual ratings of experienced suspense obtained after each text passage were found to be related to activation in the medial frontal cortex, bilateral frontal regions (along the inferior frontal sulcus), lateral premotor cortex, as well as posterior temporal and temporo-parietal areas. The results indicate that the emotional experience of suspense depends on brain areas associated with social cognition and predictive inference.

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.

The emotion potential of words and passages in reading Harry Potter--an fMRI study

Previous studies suggested that the emotional connotation of single words automatically recruits attention. We investigated the potential of words to induce emotional engagement when reading texts. In an fMRI experiment, we presented 120 text passages from the Harry Potter book series. Results showed significant correlations between affective word (lexical) ratings and passage ratings. Furthermore, affective lexical ratings correlated with activity in regions associated with emotion, situation model building, multi-modal semantic integration, and Theory of Mind. We distinguished differential influences of affective lexical, inter-lexical, and supra-lexical variables: differential effects of lexical valence were significant in the left amygdala, while effects of arousal-span (the dynamic range of arousal across a passage) were significant in the left amygdala and insula. However, we found no differential effect of passage ratings in emotion-associated regions. Our results support the hypothesis that the emotion potential of short texts can be predicted by lexical and inter-lexical affective variables.

Simulating fiction: individual differences in literature comprehension revealed with FMRI

When we read literary fiction, we are transported to fictional places, and we feel and think along with the characters. Despite the importance of narrative in adult life and during development, the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying fiction comprehension are unclear. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate how individuals differently employ neural networks important for understanding others’ beliefs and intentions (mentalizing), and for sensori-motor simulation while listening to excerpts from literary novels. Localizer tasks were used to localize both the cortical motor network and the mentalizing network in participants after they listened to excerpts from literary novels. Results show that participants who had high activation in anterior medial prefrontal cortex (aMPFC; part of the mentalizing network) when listening to mentalizing content of literary fiction, had lower motor cortex activity when they listened to action-related content of the story, and vice versa. This qualifies how people differ in their engagement with fiction: some people are mostly drawn into a story by mentalizing about the thoughts and beliefs of others, whereas others engage in literature by simulating more concrete events such as actions. This study provides on-line neural evidence for the existence of qualitatively different styles of moving into literary worlds, and adds to a growing body of literature showing the potential to study narrative comprehension with neuroimaging methods.

The magical activation of left amygdala when reading Harry Potter: an fMRI study on how descriptions of supra-natural events entertain and enchant

Literature containing supra-natural, or magical events has enchanted generations of readers. When reading narratives describing such events, readers mentally simulate a text world different from the real one. The corresponding violation of world-knowledge during this simulation likely increases cognitive processing demands for ongoing discourse integration, catches readers’ attention, and might thus contribute to the pleasure and deep emotional experience associated with ludic immersive reading. In the present study, we presented participants in an MR scanner with passages selected from the Harry Potter book series, half of which described magical events, while the other half served as control condition. Passages in both conditions were closely matched for relevant psycholinguistic variables including, e.g., emotional valence and arousal, passage-wise mean word imageability and frequency, and syntactic complexity. Post-hoc ratings showed that readers considered supra-natural contents more surprising and more strongly associated with reading pleasure than control passages. In the fMRI data, we found stronger neural activation for the supra-natural than the control condition in bilateral inferior frontal gyri, bilateral inferior parietal lobules, left fusiform gyrus, and left amygdala. The increased activation in the amygdala (part of the salience and emotion processing network) appears to be associated with feelings of surprise and the reading pleasure, which supra-natural events, full of novelty and unexpectedness, brought about. The involvement of bilateral inferior frontal gyri likely reflects higher cognitive processing demand due to world knowledge violations, whereas increased attention to supra-natural events is reflected in inferior frontal gyri and inferior parietal lobules that are part of the fronto-parietal attention network.

Extracting salient sublexical units from written texts: "Emophon," a corpus-based approach to phonological iconicity

A GROWING BODY OF LITERATURE IN PSYCHOLOGY, LINGUISTICS, AND THE NEUROSCIENCES HAS PAID INCREASING ATTENTION TO THE UNDERSTANDING OF THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN PHONOLOGICAL REPRESENTATIONS OF WORDS AND THEIR MEANING: a phenomenon also known as phonological iconicity. In this article, we investigate how a text's intended emotional meaning, particularly in literature and poetry, may be reflected at the level of sublexical phonological salience and the use of foregrounded elements. To extract such elements from a given text, we developed a probabilistic model to predict the exceeding of a confidence interval for specific sublexical units concerning their frequency of occurrence within a given text contrasted with a reference linguistic corpus for the German language. Implementing this model in a computational application, we provide a text analysis tool which automatically delivers information about sublexical phonological salience allowing researchers, inter alia, to investigate effects of the sublexical emotional tone of texts based on current findings on phonological iconicity.