The Arts and Empathy

Last night I participated in a wonderful symposium on the relation between the arts and empathy, organized by Roots of Empathy and hosted at the Bata Shoe Museum. The panel consisted of Cameron Bailey (Artistic Director, Toronto International Film Festival) and Martha Durbin (Chair, Board of Trustees for the Royal Ontario Museum), along with myself. Dr. Ellen Winner (Boston College) was also an intended participant via Skype, but unfortunately the technology did not cooperate. Mary Ito (CBC, Roots of Empathy) did a wonderful job as moderator, guiding us through a discussion of how various forms of the arts might possibly help to foster empathy with others, particularly those who are different from ourselves and often members of vulnerable populations. So many interesting ideas got bandied about, but a few broad ideas stood out to me:

1. How might different forms of art, such as theatre, film, historical artifacts, and even non-representational/non-figurative abstract visual art potentially provoke and challenge people to take on the experiences of others who live quite different lives from our own?

2. Does art attract empathic people? Does it foster empathy in people who come to art? Or could both things be true simultaneously?

3. Why do some instances of art succeed in encouraging the audience to empathize with someone quite different from him or herself, whereas other instances of art might fail to do so?

4. How might art affect children differently from adults, with respect to the promotion or engagement of empathy?

This night was also a reminder to me of the absolutely fantastic work that Roots of Empathy does throughout the world. For those who don't know, Roots of Empathy is a program in which young schoolchildren, often those living in under-served neighbourhoods, are guided through a series of lessons centred around visits by a parent and her baby. I had the very good fortune of witnessing the program in action and I have to say it's absolutely amazing. You can read more about my take in a previous post. Please consider supporting this wonderful organization in any way you can. For those interested in making a financial contribution, it is possible to do so here.

A huge thank you to the organizers for allowing me to a part of this, Mary for her deft moderating skills, and Cameron and Martha for fostering such an interesting and entertaining discussion.

IGEL Conference on Literature and Empathy

I recently participated in a fantastic workshop sponsored by the International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature (its acronym comes from its original German name, which also means "hedgehog," hence the logo). Organized by Drs. Berenike Hermann and Gerhard Lauer (University of Göttingen), it featured an impressive line-up of researchers all doing excellent empirical work on this topic. Although a great deal of fascinating findings were presented, the general consensus was that there is much work left to do. Thankfully, there are a great many researchers up to this challenge including an exciting cohort of young scientist! The organizers of this conference have been generous enough to post all of the abstracts from the speakers and I would greatly encourage readers of this site to take a look. All talks were also recorded and hopefully these will also be available over the next couple of weeks. A full list of speakers appears below. Right now you can also see some photos and comments from participants on Twitter (#IGEL2015). It is exciting indeed to see so much work being done on this topic! 

Also, if you are a researcher, please consider becoming a member of IGEL. They are a lovely group of people.  

Markus Appel

Marisa Bortolussi & Peter Dixon

Emanuele Castano

Frank Hakemulder

Roel Willems

Elsi Kaiser

Emy Koopman

Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer

Anne Mangen

Raymond Mar

Tobias Richter

Massimo Salgaro

Mette Steenberg

Willie van Peer

Mikkel Wallentin

Fenja Ziegler

Morality at the Movies

Going to a feature film or watching a television drama is a moral activity. So says Carl Plantinga in a talk he gave to this year’s meeting of the Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image, and in a book he is writing with the tentative title: Spectator Judge: Affect and Ethics in Narrative Film and Television. The Society meets annually, and this summer the meeting was at Franklin and Marshall College, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. It was ably and agreeably hosted by Dirk Eitzen.

Plantinga argues that film and television narratives are ethically significant because they play a role in the construction of our systems of morality at both personal and cultural levels. First, his argument goes, narrative films cue us to judge, believe, and feel emotions in various ways. Second, they offer us representations that are particularly vivid, as to why we should make judgements, exercise beliefs, and experience emotions. Third, one of the ways in which films have this effect is by offering us various pleasures and enjoyments. Fourth, they invite us to transfer judgements, beliefs, and emotions from the realm of fiction to the real world.

Fiction films and television dramas, in other words, are persuasive devices. One might say that although analysis of film has largely been thought of as a branch of poetics, according to Plantinga’s argument it should better be seen as a branch of rhetoric. The spectator is typically invited by a film into the position of making judgements about characters and their actions, and this immediately makes film a moral activity. Film therefore offers a sentimental education, teaching people about emotional scripts and structures of feeling. It invites us into a state of transportation and engagement, and we are pleasurably rewarded by the moral and evaluative emotions we experience, carefully specified for us by writers and directors. For instance, we feel empathy and sympathy for a protagonist, and this will lead to relief and satisfaction in the promise of justice. In response to cruel or contemptuous behaviour of a character, we feel anger and disgust, and we are pleased to see wrong-doers punished. We recognize sacrificial acts, which induce states of admiration.

I think that Plantinga is right about film and television dramas being about moral and ethical matters. This is seen, for instance, by the reflection of values of the societies in which they are made. In the West, for instance, we place great value in individual experience and in each individual life. It seems to me, however, that, in film and television dramas that are art rather than just entertainment, room is left for us as spectators to make not just judgements that we are persuaded to make by writers and directors, but our own judgements. Here, perhaps, film and television dramas attain their most important moral significance.

Image of the Spectator Judge (from Carl Plantinga’s slide show).

At the MLA

Until the beginning of this year I knew of the MLA principally through David Lodge's novel Small World (1984), in which Philip Swallow of Brummidge University (recognizable as the University of Birmingham), Morris Zapp of Euphoric State University (recognizable as Berkeley), and others, attend an MLA meeting.

MLA is an acronym for the Modern Language Association of America. But, as with the United Kingdom which is neither united nor a kingdom, the words don't mean what they say. As David Lodge points out in his novel, when the words say "Modern Language," the Association is not really concerned with language but with literature, mostly literature in English. As well as that, although "Modern" could refer to something written recently, it could equally refer to Beowulf, written a thousand years ago. Also, MLA doesn't usually mean the Association, but the Association's annual meeting, which is held in a big city and attended by several thousand people at the beginning of each year. It runs over four days, with more than 30 sessions in parallel on a bewildering array of topics. It's where young people who have just received their PhDs in literature interview for jobs, where assistant professors look for jobs as associate professors at better universities than the ones that they are currently at, and where scholars who are established can be lauded.

I was very pleased to be invited to the 2013 MLA by Patrick Hogan, to present some the work we do on the psychology of fiction. There at the conference, too, were some people whom I am very glad to know, who run the MLA Division on Cognitive Approaches to Literature. Since these approaches have begun, I have been hoping that they would become rather prominent. This hope has been encouraged by David Lodge himself having written both a novel, Thinks (2001), and a theoretical piece (2002), about cognitive approaches to literature. But this movement has, I am sad to say, not yet completely filled the vacuum left by the demise of post-modernism.

The MLA meeting that is depicted in Small World is held in New York, and its big event is a session on "The Function of Criticism." In it Philip Swallow says that this function is to assist in the function of literature itself, which is to enable us to live more fully, more finely. Michel Tardieu says that the function of criticism is not to offer interpretations, but to understand the structural laws that allow literature to be produced at all. Siegfried von Turpitz says that Tardieu's project is doomed to failure because works of literature come into existence only in the mind of the reader. Fulvia Morgana says that the function of criticism is to wage war against the very concept of literature, because it's an instrument of bourgeois hegemony. And Morris Zapp says that this function is to reach no conclusion whatever because to read literature is to subject oneself to displacements of curiosity and desire endlessly from one sentence to another. 

In the 30 years since Small World was written, structuralism has become post-structuralism, but some streams of criticism depicted in the novel are still recognizable. Noticeable additions have been made, especially of minority and post-colonial literatures. The main big event that I could find in the 2013 MLA meeting, held in Boston, was of a panel in which three distinguished literary scholars spoke on "Why teach literature?"

The first of these scholars was Patricia Yaeger whose title was "The embodied classroom." I was interested that, apart from Mark Doty, a poet, the people whose work she drew on were psychologists and philosophers. One was Christopher Bollas (see e.g. Bollas, 2011) a Winnicottian psychoanalyst who has proposed that literature can be "a holding environment," and a "transformational object." Yaeger went on discuss the work of the cognitive theoreticians Andy Clark and David Chalmers, who have developed the idea of the extended mind. Teaching literature, she said, offers conditions for extending the mind, and for distributing cognition.

The second scholar was Jean-Michel Rabaté who called his talk "Why teach what you already know?" He concentrated on a 1955 dispute between F.R. Leavis and Clement Greenberg. He disagreed with Leavis's proposal that literature can enable us to become better people, and agreed with Greenberg that it only explains what we already know. I wanted to ask why achieving such explanations did not, in itself, enable us to become better people, but I didn't get the chance.

The third scholar was Helen Vendler who entitled her talk "Why teach? Why literature?" She was the person I really wanted to hear, because I am an ardent admirer of her 1997 book on Shakespeare's Sonnets. She said that literature is often taught in courses on the great books, and that these courses are about the history of ideas. But really, she said, the generative force of literature is not ideas but emotions. So, once again, here seemed to be a plea for a rapprochement of psychology and literature.

I live in hope.

Bollas, C. (2011). The Christopher Bollas reader. New York: Routledge.
Clark, A., & Chalmers, D. (1998). The extended mind. Analysis, 58, 7-19.
Leavis, F. R., & Greenberg, C. (1955). A critical exchange. Commentary (August). http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/a-critical-exchange/
Lodge, D. (1984). Small world. London: Secker & Warburg.
Lodge, D. (2001). Thinks. London: Secker & Warburg.
Lodge, D. (2002). Consciousness and the novel. In D. Lodge (Ed.), Consciousness and the novel (pp. 1-91). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Vendler, H. (1997). The art of Shakespeare's sonnets. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.




   

Research Bulletin: Writing a Better Story

As researchers of narrative, we are often asked by writers how our work can inform their practice. In other words, people want to know if empirical research can tell them how to write a better story. For the most part, I’ve not known how to reply to this question and offer up the verbal equivalent of a shrug. After all, I think the last time I wrote a piece of fiction was probably a decade ago, unless you account my more theoretical papers. Susanne Kinnebrock (Aachen) and Helena Bilandzic (Erfurt), however, have tackled this question directly. In a paper presented at an International Communication Association conference, the two discuss explicitly how psychological theories and research might be incorporated into the writing of compelling stories. Specifically, they combine insight from Melanie Green’s (UNC-Chapel Hill) Transportation Imagery model of narrative persuasion with traditional theorizing on narrativity, in order to isolate those factors they believe increase the likelihood that a story will be engaging. These factors operate at all different levels of a story, from the raw plot points to the way these situations are portrayed in a film or novel. To highlight a few of their proposals, these authors argue that engaging stories should portray events that have lasting consequences, are unique and involve conflict, while representing characters who develop and evolve over time in a way that is likely to evoke emotions in the reader through the artistry of the presentation. As always, we would be happy to send a copy of this paper to those who are interested (e-mail available in my profile). 

Kinnebrock, S. & Bilandzic, H. (2006). How to make a story work: Introducing the concept of narrativity into narrative persuasion. Presented at the International Communication Association conference in Dresden. 

StoryWorld

Last month in Hollywood, I attended a conference called StoryWorld 2. Looking to the left from the window of my hotel room I could see the famous sign on the hills. The conference was held in this hotel, part of the building complex where the Academy Awards take place. The complex includes The Babylon Court, which features a ten-storey-tall monumental arch, and giant elephants sitting on giant columns, inspired by the set of D.W. Griffiths's 1917 film Intolerance, which apparently employed 1000 extras.

The attendees at the conference were mostly writers, system designers, producers, publishers, and the like. The concept at the centre of the event was "transmedia." The ever-helpful Wikipedia says the term was coined in 1991 by Marsha Kinder to refer to the "technique of telling a single story or story experience across multiple platforms and formats."

Here is how to think about it. If you were Thomas Malory you wouldn't just write a book called Le Morte d'Arthur. You might do that, but it would be somewhat incidental to your franchise which would centre on the production of the movies Morte d' 1, Morte d' 2, Morte d' 3 …, a television series, and a raft of video games. It would come with the marketing of slinky Guinevere Gowns and a selection of Round Tables in sizes ideal for every home. There would be a game in which people would spear knights who would ride at them full tilt on the screens of their cell phones. Then, at your theme park, actors trained to play Sir Lancelot would first make the acquaintance of women visitors, and then perhaps make an improper suggestion.

Disneyland, invented so we were told at the conference, by Walt himself, was intended as a place in which not just children but whole families could play. It's billed as a place of the imagination, and I can see why. But my sense when I visited many years ago, with my family, was that the roller-coasters didn't leave much to the imagination. They were carefully engineered sequences of visual, acoustic, and proprioceptive input. A Disney imagineer, to whom I put this, said that this was perhaps right, but that members of the Disney Imagineering Research and Development group are very concerned to make visits more interactive. One interesting idea I heard from a member of this group, was that they were considering how actors might be trained to pick up cues from a visitor they would approach, in order to enact a role with which the visitor might be interested to take a complementary part.

The central idea of this second year of StoryWorld was of audience members becoming participants. A person I was pleased to hear was Tim Kring, writer of Conspiracy for good, in which not only did fans communicate with writers, offering feedback, and influencing how things might go in later episodes, but they took part in a conspiracy to defeat the efforts of a large multinational company that wanted to construct a pipeline that was incompatible the building of a library in a village in Zambia. The story-world included trying to find a person who had travelled from Zambia to London to influence the multinational company, and who seemed to have been kidnapped. Over four successive Saturdays in 2010, in London, participants used Nokia cell-phones to communicate with each other, and photographically to pick up electronic tags hidden on graffiti, each of which would unlock the next clue on their cell phone, in a kind of scavenger hunt, to help discover the multinational company's illegal activities. Actors were hired as employees of the company to hinder the participants, and underground concerts took place. The mode has also become known as social benefit storytelling: five libraries were built.

For a long time, dramatists have conceived modes in which audience members would take part in plays as they unfolded, and even contribute to the stories. Many movies are collaborations between writers, directors and editors, influenced also by audience reactions. Novelists talk about the experience of how characters take on lives of their own. What they mean is that the context of a story can start to guide the actions and development of characters in ways they had not anticipated. One of the interesting attributes of the movement of participant involvement in story generation is that such contexts might include participants' engagement in a story as it develops.

Kring, T. (2010). Conspiracy for good. www.conspiracyforgood.com/

Research Bulletin: IGEL 2012 Conference

In early July, the International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature and Media held its 13th Biennial meeting. Originally named in German as Internationale Gesellschaft für Empirische Literaturwissenschaft, the society take IGEL as its acronym, which means hedgehog in German. IGEL has long been at the forefront of promoting empirical psychological research into literature and fiction more broadly, and it recently launched its own peer-reviewed journal, Scientific Studies of Literature, edited by Willie van Peer. A number of fascinating presentations took place at IGEL 2012, and here we summarize just a few highlights to give readers a “first taste” of new research that is often on the cusp of entering the published literature. 

Jonathan Leavitt, who published a fascinating study last year on spoilers (covered in this OnFiction post), presented a new series of studies demonstrating that although readers often cannot distinguish between fiction and nonfiction (based solely on the text), they respond differently to these two genres with respect to preferences and liking. 

OnFiction’s own Maja Djikic (University of Toronto), presented a study demonstrating that reading a short-story produces an increase in self-reported cognitive empathy, but reading a short essay has no such effect. This effect, however, only occurred for individuals who had little appreciation for aesthetics and art. 

Paul Sopcak (University of Alberta), examined how different readers respond to passages from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and found that a subset of readers express deep engagement with the existential themes of these passages. 

Keith Oatley (University of Toronto), a founder and editor of OnFiction, presented new data on how literature can change how we see ourselves, showing that it is the artistic qualities of the text that determine this possibility for self-transformation, rather than the genres of fiction or nonfiction per se.

Based at the Medical University of Vienna, Benedikt Till presented fascinating data showing that watching a censored version of a film depicting capital punishment, where the execution scene has been omitted, actually produces stronger negative reactions against the death penalty compared to watching a film that presents this execution in a graphic manner.

Lastly, Katrina Fong (York University) examined whether how exposure to different literary genres is related to one’s ability to infer what other people are thinking and feeling. Perhaps surprisingly, after controlling for various factors, only two genres were related to interpersonal sensitivity: romance and suspense/thriller. 

There were so many fascinating presentations made at this conference, and this is just a small taste of the work on display. A copy of the full program can be found here, and we are all very much looking forward to the next conference in 2014.

Toronto Comic Arts Festival paean: the Fantastic

For those readers in Toronto, or able to get there, I will simultaneously express my envy and draw your attention to the upcoming quite-salient-to-fiction-and-psychology Toronto Comic Arts Festival kick-off event (May 4th at 7pm at the Toronto Reference Library -- free but ticketed): a three way conversation between Jeff Smith, Gabriel Bá, and Fábio Moon on Noir and the Fantastic in Comics and Graphic Novels.

I am a long-time appreciator of the storytelling potential of both graphic novels and the fantastic and, coincidentally, have just finished Daytripper, Bá and Moon's fantastic exploration of (minor spoiler warning: skip to the next paragraph if you wish to leave the narrative structure of Daytripper intact) an obituary writer's multiple possible deaths. Daytripper presents a focused meditation on, in the authors' words, "a story about quiet moments ... about what you can tell from somebody's eyes," via both a story and images that epitomize the fantastic.

Similarly, Jeff Smith's graphic epid Bone tells a story that is so overtly fantastical that it often satirizes fantasy -- and yet is, at the same time, filled with feeling and characters the reader cannot help animating. All three of these authors play with forms of storytelling that toy with our expectations about the way a story is told, almost picking those expectations up while we are reading and turning them over so that we can see them more clearly in the story -- a rare art, especially while we are held entranced, wondering what is happening with the characters, with the plot, with the setting. As I have written about comics before, the comics form can enable surplus space for narrative metacognition: room to see the relationship between these components of our experience of fiction in a way that we usually look past as we read through stories.

Quick Hit: 2012 IGEL Conference in Montreal

The academic society with aims that are closest to those of OnFiction is the International Society for Empirical Research on Literature (click here). The society was founded in 1987, and it's usually known as IGEL, which is the acronym for the Society's name in German. It holds conferences every two years, usually alternating between Europe and North America. The next conference is in Montreal, Canada, between 7 and 10 July 2012. Recently the Society started its own journal, Scientific Study of Literature. If you are a researcher, please consider joining the Society, coming to the next conference, and contributing to the journal.

Quick Hit: Art, Science and the Brain

I'll be participating in a conference that may be of interest to OnFiction readers. What follows is their example blog post, generously provided so that I don't have to write my own:

At the end of the month/beginning of next month I’ll be taking part in a conference that is being put on by ArtsSmarts and Social Innovation Generation at the MaRS Discovery District (SiG@MaRS) – Art, Science and the Brain: New Models of Learning for the 21st Century. It’s a two-day affair (Monday, October 31st – Tuesday, November 1st) that promises to be very interesting: 21 sessions, and 80+ innovators from across North America whose expertise includes education, neuroscience, art and technology. We’ll be putting together interactive sessions with the goal of letting participants collaborate to reimagine the education system. If you would like more information you can take a look at the website.

Quick Hit: National Reading Summit II

The National Reading Campaign is holding its annual summit in Montréal, from the 20th to the 21st. This group of like-minded and hardworking individuals are working toward the adoption of a national reading policy for Canada, clearly a worthy cause. Patsy Aldana, one of the founders of this campaign, was recently awarded the Order of Canada. For those of you who are unable to attend, they will be hosting a webcast that you can subscribe to. Simultaneous translation into English and French will be provided. It is an impressive group that they have assembled for this year's meeting, including Shane Peacock, Stanley Péan, and John Ralston Saul. Also speaking is Mr. Li, the principal of a fascinating and highly successful school centred entirely around reading. I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Li and can attest to the fact that his approach to education has the potential to revolutionize how we view the role of reading in our schools. I would encourage all of you to consider participating in this summit via web-cast and helping to support this valuable undertaking.

(Videos from last year's summit have generously been posted on their website.)

Announcing A New Journal

An exciting announcement was made at the recent IGEL conference in Utrecht. (We have been enjoying some wonderful essays over the past few weeks from the "Stillness Contest" also presented at this meeting.) The society has decided to launch its own journal, entitled the Scientific Study of Literature (SSOL), publishing the very best empirical work on literature. Willie van Peer will act as head editor, working alongside Max Louwerse, Joan Peskin, and myself, as associate editors. Together we have assembled a very impressive review editorial board, which includes OnFiction's own Keith Oatley, along with some other names that might sound familiar to our readers (e.g., Steven Pinker, James Pennebaker). Below is a brief description of the journal from our publisher, John Benjamins:

Literature has an important role in human culture. Broadly interpreted, literature is defined as all cultural artefacts that make use of literary devices, such as narrativity, metaphoricity, symbolism. Its manifestations include novels, short stories, poetry, theatre, film, television, and, more recently, digital forms such as hypertext storytelling. This new journal, Scientific Study of Literature (SSOL), will publish empirical studies that apply scientific stringency to cast light on the structure and function of literary phenomena. The journal welcomes contributions from many disciplinary perspectives (psychological, developmental, cross-cultural, cognitive, neuroscience, computational, and educational) to deepen our understanding of literature, literary processes, and literary applications.

Our first issue should appear mid-2011, and will include a number of short pieces from leaders in the field with their thoughts on the future of the empirical study of literature. It promises to be an exciting collection. Members of IGEL receive the journal for free, so if you are interested in these topics please consider becoming a member of this society. More importantly, if you are a researcher, please consider submitting something to our new journal!

Conference: IGEL in Utrecht

In November last year we did a post on IGEL, an acronym for the German translation of the International Society for Empirical Research on Literature (click here). This society has goals that are close to those of OnFiction, and Raymond Mar and I are both due to attend its 2010 conference in Utrecht, from 7 to 11 July. Perhaps some of you are signed up to attend, too. I hope so; it will be good to see you there. To join IGEL go their website (click here) where you will also find a link to the conference program.

This year's conference is organized by Frank Hakemulder (who has contributed to OnFiction, click here). Its keynote speakers give an excellent sense of some of the interesting research in our area, which I thought I might take the opportunity of mentioning in this post.

The first keynote speaker in Utrecht will be Gerry Cupchik, who has worked for many years in psychological aesthetics, studying visual and literary art. In an interesting recent paper with Michelle Hilsher (Hilsher & Cupchik, 2005) the researchers compared responses to poetry presented in three different ways. They found that people preferred to read poetry themselves rather than to listen to it, to hear it, or to see it performed, because in reading they were better able to explore and interpret literary devices in an independent and creative manner.

The second keynote speaker is Joan Peskin (who has contributed to OnFiction, click here). She has been influential in showing how the methodology of expertise can be applied to reading literature. In a 1998 article, for instance, she showed that expert readers (graduate students in English) of pieces of metaphysical poetry that were unknown to them were able to employ concepts that were more useful and more far reaching in understanding a poem than novices (undergraduates), who tended to spend their time worrying over words and phrases.

The third keynote speaker is Susanne Janssen who studies the way in which literary culture and media are taken up in society. With Giselinde Kuipers and Marc Verboord (2008) she conducted a large study of arts coverage in newspapers in USA and several European counties. The researchers found that international coverage increased in European countries between1955 and 2005 in a manner the researchers called "globalization from within," but this had not occurred in USA. In all the countries studied, non-Western arts remained under-represented.

The next keynote is by Peter Vorderer and Bradford Owen. I first met Peter about fifteen years ago, when he told me about a study he had headed (published as Vorderer, Knobloch, & Schramm, 2001), in which he and his colleagues had used two versions of a German commercial TV movie. In an experiment the film was stopped at one point, and some of the watchers were asked to say whether they would like to see (a) the female character hand some money to the male protagonist, or (b) to see her kiss him, or (c) to see the version that the director preferred. If they chose (c) they saw either the (a) version or the (b) version. After the scene in which the money hand-over or the kiss occurred, the movie was the same for everybody. The researchers found that for those who had not graduated from high school the traditional, more passive, experience produced the most empathy and suspense, while those who had graduated from high-school were able to enhance their experience by making a choice. (Bradford Owen has recently completed his PhD, which was also on effects of cognitive capacity on enjoyment of film.)

The fifth keynote speaker is Sheldon Solomon, whose work I did not previously know. His title is "The worm at the core: The role of death in life and literature." Solomon has concentrated his research on why we suffer terror. A much cited article is of Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, Sheldon Solomon, et al.'s (1990) study in which they showed that when people were reminded of their own mortality they became more likely to favour their in-group and to discriminate against an out-group.

The rest of the conference program looks pretty good too!

Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, Sheldon Solomon et al., (1990). Evidence for terror management theory II: The effects of mortality salience on reactions to those who threaten or bolster the cultural worldview. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 58, 308-318.

Susanne Janssen, Giselinde Kuipers & Marc Verboord (2008). Cultural globalization and arts journalism: The international orientation of arts and culture coverage in Dutch, French, German, and U.S. newspapers, 1955 to 2005. American Sociological Review, 73, 719-740.

Michelle Hilsher & Gerald Cupchik (2005). Reading, hearing, and seeing poetry performed. Empirical Studies of the Arts, 23, 47-64.

Joan Peskin (1998). Constructing meaning when reading poetry: An expert-novice study. Cognition and Instruction, 16, 235-263.

Peter Vorderer, Silvia Knobloch & Holger Schramm (2001). Does entertainment suffer from interactivity? The impact of watching an interactive TV Movie on viewers' experience. Media Psychology, 3, 342-363.

National Reading Summit Report

On Friday I had the honour of speaking at the TD National Reading Summit, a conference organized by the Reading Coalition, designed to initiate the development of a national reading policy. It was an amazing event, humbling in so many ways. For one, it was fantastic to see good intentions combine so successfully with drive, talent, and ambition to create such a thoughtful event. This was not a passive affair, but one in which a great deal of debate, discussion, and sharing of knowledge went on, all well-recorded and with a clear eye on defining and meeting achievable goals.

The day began with Canadian sci-fi author Cory Doctorow, a careful thinker fascinated by our future and how the present technology culture will inform it. He gave an absolutely fascinating discussion on issues pertaining to copyright, which have rapidly become altered by a trend toward the licensing of material rather than purchasing. E-books, for example, are not owned once purchased but only licensed, which means their use is highly restricted and subject often to the whims of the licensee. The recent overnight deletion of Orwell’s 1984 from idle kindles, without the permission of users, acting as one stunning example of how different the world has become. It is impossible to imagine a similar event occurring with a bookseller and a newly purchased hardcover. Mr. Doctorow made a number of novel and intriguing points regarding the power of copyright to promote and protect the sharing of media and stories, while also protecting the author from theft and distortion. Part of his argument on the important role of copying for creativity, can be found in this article in Locus Magazine. Mr. Doctorow also practices what he preaches, and you can download many of his books for free from his site.

My own session was shared with Patsy Aldana and Jane Pyper. Ms. Aldana spoke of her work with the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY), an organization that brings books to children during times of trauma, brought on by war or national disaster, for example. Her description of a volunteer reading to shell-shocked children in shelters in Lebanon, as bombs fell all around, was heart-breaking, incredibly humbling, and only one of many similar examples of the incredible work done by this organization all around the world. IBBY relies primarily on volunteers, and the contributions of donors. You can become a member of the organization for as little as $10.

Jane Pyper is the City Librarian in charge of the Toronto Public Library, the world’s busiest urban public library system. I was raised in libraries, and recall with great fondness the trips my family used to take to the library on every Saturday. I loved everything about that place, and knew every inch of it. Each visit would end with me reluctant to leave, but thrilled with the stack of books I could barely carry out on my own. Ms. Pyper spoke about the concrete things that needed to be considered in order to create a reading society in Canada. Her most important point, I think, was to stress that in the context of promoting literacy, we cannot afford to indulge elitist beliefs of good and bad reading. All reading is good reading, be it a novel, choose-your-own-adventure, graphic novel, comic-book, blog, magazine, or fact-book.

Thomas King, the Canadian author, entertained us all during lunch, with a demonstration of his considerable storytelling skill. He explained, in his inimitable fashion, how his path to becoming a writer was merely an accident; seeking refuge from bullies in a library put him on this path. One can only imagine how different world would be if that building he sought out had turned out to be a bakery.