absorbed character engagement

Abstract

…there's a part of you that…you've grown accustomed to not sharing with other people.It's a very private, intimate personal aspect of yourself, and then all of a sudden you see it reflected in something other than yourself. A sense of acknowledgement, that you're being acknowledged. That's why I call it positive. It's an affirmation that the ideas you have, the emotions you have, aren't yours alone; they're things that are found in others that you can share. That's what I got from this film." -Participant 18 on Bergman's Winter Light (1963) Absorbed character engagementa special case of character engagementis a deeply personal, complex and meaningful experience leaving viewers and readers with a profound impact on the self, illustrated by the quote above. This chapter explores how absorbed character engagement comes about and what psychological processes and phenomenological experiences are reflected in it. To this end, we conducted interviews on absorbed film and literary experiences and analyzed them in light of concepts of character engagement developed in cognitive film studies. This phenomenological-empirical approach is not that common in cognitive film studies. Being mostly concerned with neurological and psychological mechanisms the phenomenology of character engagement tends to suffer some undertheorizing. To address this gap, we consider first-person experiences in more depth than usual in cognitive film studies.This study explores how fictional characters appear in the narrative experience, and what personal meanings are attributed to them by audience members.3 Mind and Person Perception in Character EngagementFictional characters have been conceptualized as narrative constructions in the text, or as mental constructions in the audience. 1 This latter approach states that characters are imaginary human beings having mental states and stable traits that are constructed mentally by audience members from signs in fictional texts. Following this latter mimetic assumption, research on character engagement borrowed much from social cognition, the field in social psychology studying how people make sense of others and themselves in the real social world. 2 Two major social cognition research strands are relevant for character engagement: person perception and mind perception. 3 Person perception in character engagement is a dynamic process in which narrative information cues mental schemas in audiences. The idea of character engagement as person perception was expressed in work by Dolf Zillmann, Murray Smith, Carl Plantinga and Ed Tan. 4 These authors describe character engagement as a largely automated process involving spontaneous perception and comprehension of social information. Viewers' and readers' impressions of characters are guided by characters' physical appearance, non-verbal communication and observable behavior. These features implicitly activate previously stored mental representations of social situations. Prototypical narrative situations or genre relatedexpectations are more likely to act...

A Study of Secondary School Students’ Perceptions of Fictional Characters

“…Our participants remarked that they were more interested in and identified more with fictional characters based on their position and roles in the story [the protagonist (n: 6), someone the protagonist knows (n: 2) or the character who is responsible for the unfolding of events (n: 1)], which is consistent with the literature. Bálint and Tan (2019) interviewed a group of 25 people between the ages of 21-72 with different ethnic backgrounds and found that they were more interested in the protagonists' inner worlds than other characters. Çevik and Müldür (2019) found that almost all students (25 out of 28) wanted to be one of the characters around the protagonist (except the protagonist's mother) or one of the characters in the book.…”

On how Fiction Impacts the Self-Concept: Transformative Reading Experiences and Storyworld Possible Selves

“…We are also interested in how some aspects of the reading experience may affect the generation of SPSs. Bálint and Tan (2019) observed that readers spontaneously and frequently mentioned similarities and desired similarities with fictional characters when they described their highly absorbed narrative experiences. Thus, we believe that some dimensions of state Story World Absorption (Kuijpers et al, 2014) may relate to the activation of storyworld possible selves.…”