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

Abstract

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

Effects of Literature on Empathy and Self-Reflection: A Theoretical-Empirical Framework

“…It is thus not surprising that »empathy« and »sympathy« are often used interchangeably. Recently, however, scholars have pleaded to distinguish the two, with »empathy« designating experiencing emotions perceived as similar to the character(s) (»feeling with«), and »sympathy« designating feeling concern for another without feeling what the other feels (»feeling for«; e. g., Busselle/Bilandzic 2009;Coplan 2004;Keen 2006;Mar/ Oatley 2008;Mar et al 2011). The question is to what extent readers experience this theoretical difference in practice.…”

“…Finally, we will synthesize our findings in our explanatory model in Section 4. We will make use of earlier overviews (Hakemulder 2000;Keen 2007;Kimmel 1970;Klemenz-Belgardt 1981;Mar/Oatley/ Djikic/Mullin 2011), adding other and more recent empirical work that will help us to build a synthetic framework for future research. Yet, before all this, we need to define the key terms (Section 1).…”

Narrative intelligence represented in translational success: issues of coherence, gaps, complexity and aesthetics

“…It is this human ability to organise experience into narrative which is called NI (Blair and Meyer, 1997). In a very much similar point of view NI is considered as one's ability to organise and explain experiences in narrative terms (Mateas and Sengers, 1999), to comprehend and make inferences about narratives we are told and to produce affective responses such as empathy to narratives (Mar et al, 2011). Randall (1999: 11) expresses that "Without NI it can be argued, countless processes integral to human existence are impossible, perhaps inconceivable".…”

Populist Upheavals: What can we do?

“…One should find mechanisms to incline well-known, recognizable publicists to realize programs devoted to reviewing books and movies, who would like to advocate such cultural products [78,79]. Scientific publications in the field of mental health services should discuss and propose examples of such literary and cinematographic products.…”