Shakespeare sonnet reading: An empirical study of emotional responses

Abstract

The present study combines literary theory and cognitive psychology to empirically explore some cognitive and emotional facets of poetry reading, exemplified by the reading of three Shakespeare sonnets. Specifically, predictions generated combining quantitative textual analysis according to the Neurocognitive Poetics model with qualitative textual analysis based on the Foregrounding assessment Matrix of sonnets no. 27, 60 and 66 are empirically tested by analyzing 45 subjects’ ratings of the three sonnets. Reflecting the differences in foregrounding potential of the three sonnets found in the textual analysis, we expected to find different reader responses, accordingly. Our dependent variables are well-established categories of emotional evaluation (e.g. valence and arousal) and cognitive, affective and aesthetic aspects of readers’ responses (e.g. liking and understanding) as well as less common ones (e.g. wonder, delight and mental images). The statistical analyses suggest that the type of foregrounding is more important than the number of foregrounded elements. This finding motivated further qualitative exploration of reader responses to open questions regarding mental images and perceived feelings. Comparing the free recall data about the feelings perceived in the sonnets with the ratings data about Valence and Arousal indicated that only the former one reflects a clear distinction between all three sonnets, whereas the readers’ overall evaluations did not sustain this variety of feelings. Multi-method, interdisciplinary research of this kind contributes to improving our understanding of the potentially unique mechanisms involved in poetry reception, and to forming more precise hypotheses for future experimental studies using, for example, eye tracking.

Evaluation of poetic creativity: Predictors and the role of expertise—A multilevel approach.

“…Thirty-six original English language poems from wide-ranging structures and contents (see Table 1 for details of the poems), lines and words (mean number of lines = 11, SD = 3.24; mean word count = 71.25, SD = 28.99) were selected as stimuli. Previous studies on the aesthetic evaluation of poems were based primarily on haiku, sonnet (Belfi et al, 2018; Hitsuwari & Nomura, 2022b), or Shakespeare’s sonnet (Papp-Zipernovszky et al, 2022). Despite offering some advantages, like brevity and structural rigidity/consistency, these poems may not be appropriate representatives of varieties of English poems.…”

Once known, twice hedonic: Enjoying Shakespeare’s sonnets through rereading—A deep learning perspective.

“…When they stared at the marker, the sonnets automatically appeared. After the first session, they went to another table, to fill in our self-developed article-pencil task with article and pencil (see Papp-Zipernovszky et al, 2022), but got no feedback on their answers. They then verbally paraphrased the sonnet line-by-line according to their understanding, again without any feedback or fixed answers.…”

“…Emotional responses to a poem as a whole were revealed by responses to two questions on supralexical valence and supralexical arousal, which derived from the article–pencil task (Papp-Zipernovszky et al, 2022): “In general, poems can express positive or negative emotions. When you read this poem for the first time, did it feel negative or positive?” and “In general, poems can evoke feelings ranging from boredom to excitation.…”

The role of the target language culture on Arabic learners' fondness for Arabic poetry

“…Factors affecting native speakers' liking for poetry have been researched in several languages, such as German poetry (Obermeier et al, 2013 , 2016 ; Lüdtke et al, 2014 ; Kraxenberger and Menninghaus, 2017 ), English poetry (Papp-Zipernovszky et al, 2022 ), and haiku poetry (Hitsuwari and Nomura, 2022 ). However, the factors affecting foreign language learners' liking for poetry were mainly studied in English.…”