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.

Research Bulletin: Do "You" Feel Things More Deeply than "I"?

You enter the room, spot the glances of your peers and know, that you are about to overcome your greatest weaknesses.

What does this line mean to you? Did you feel present? Empowered? Fearful? Some sort of emotional reaction would seem likely given the gravity of these words. But, intriguingly, it might not be the most obvious words in this sentence that drive your emotional reaction. Reading something like “overcome” or “greatest weaknesses” can certainly prompt strong feelings but this might be particularly the case thanks to the personal pronoun “you.” Based on fascinating research by Tad Brunyé and colleagues, It seems that reading something in the second person (using “you” as the pronoun) can elicit stronger reactions compared to reading an identical text using the first-person (i.e. “I”) (Brunyé et al., 2011). 

When we read a story, we don’t simply come to understand the information contained within the piece. Reading a story also involves imagining the events described and implied. In effect, we build a model in our minds of what’s going on in the story, known as a “situation model.” Situation models represent a wide range of information from the story, including how things look, smell, and feel, along with the emotions and actions of characters. It is these models that prompt us to embody the narrative, or feel as if we are a part of them, and all of this can be enhanced by the pronouns used. It has been shown that using the second-person (i.e. “you”) is more effective at having readers see things from a character’s perspective; compared to the first-person (i.e., “I”) or third-person (i.e., “he”). 

In a recent study, it was suggested that readers develop more in-depth situation models when they put themselves in the shoes of the characters in the story (Brunyé et al., 2011). This theory was tested by observing how readers represent events that either use “you” or “I” when describing the protagonist. In the experiment, each of the 48 native English-speaking undergraduates from Tufts University were told to read 8 passages, 4 of which used “you” as a pronoun and 4 of which used “I” as a pronoun. How well people understood each passage was measured by having people respond as quickly as possible to some yes-or-no comprehension questions. Importantly, arriving at the correct answer required participants to make some inferences regarding what was represented by the text, rather than simply remembering the text itself. In addition, before and after each passage read, emotions were measured. 

What the researchers found was that when “you” appeared in the passages, readers answered the comprehension questions more accurately and more quickly, compared to when they read the passages using “I.” This result was true only for information about the space described in the story (e.g. was the desk at the corner of the room?). Reading passages that employed “you” as the pronoun also resulted in greater shifts in emotion as a result of reading the passage, relative to the “I” passages. In other words, using the second-person (i.e., “you”) led readers to experience more profound emotions. 

It appears that stories that use the second-person may produce more emotional experiences in readers. But, why is this? The researchers suggest that reading about “you” can prompt readers to place themselves in the shoes of the characters they read, therefore thinking of themselves as being in the situation described and as a result, feel these emotions more profoundly. 

These findings might be useful for writers looking for a leg up in producing an emotional reaction in readers. Helping readers to feel a part of the story and see things from a character’s perspective, such as using “you” instead of “I,” will certainly help!

Posted by Michelle Vinitsky

References

Brunyé, T. T., Ditman, T., Mahoney, C. R., Augustyn, J. S., & Taylor, H. A. (2009). When you and I 
share perspectives: Pronouns modulate perspective-taking during narrative comprehension. Psychological Science, 20, 27-32.

Brunyé, T. T., Ditman, T., Mahoney, C. R., Taylor, H. A. (2011). Better you than I: Perspectives and 
emotion simulation during narrative comprehension. Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 23, 659-666.

Research Bulletin: Print versus Screen, Is One Superior for Comprehending a Text?

Digital reading devices such as laptops, tablets and ebook readers are progressively replacing traditional printed material. Consumers now have access to a wide variety of digital content, including books, magazines and newspapers that were previously exclusively available in print. Moreover, education is one area where this transition from print to screen is occurring at a notably rapid pace. Students use digital reading devices in order to avoid having to carry heavy textbooks and to have access to notes in one central location. Educators and school boards are increasingly integrating technologies, such as digital reading devices, into school curriculums by making use of interactive educational software and providing access to digital notes and digital textbooks. 

Due to the commercial success of digital reading devices and the rapid digitization process that is occurring in education, there are now questions as to whether reading on screen has an impact on the reading comprehension of students. Anne Mangen and colleagues from the University of Stavanger designed a study in order to determine whether students comprehend texts better when reading the text on paper versus reading the text on screen. In order to conduct this study, the researchers retained 72 tenth graders and split them into two groups. One group (n1 = 25) was asked to read the two texts in print, whereas the second group (n2 = 47) was asked to read the same two texts on a digital screen. After reading the two pieces of text, members of both groups were asked to take reading comprehension tests. Those who read on screen did worse on the reading comprehension tests compared to those who read the texts in print. In other words, there was evidence that reading a text on a screen may impair learning from text compared to reading from paper. It seems that more research and consideration is required to evaluate the effects of transitioning from printed text to digital reading devices. In the meantime school boards should err on the side of caution and not undertake expensive rapid digitization programs when the effects of this digitization are not known.

Post by Amin Khajehnassiri

* For a copy of this article, please contact R. Mar (e-mail in About section).

Mangen, A., Walgermo, B. R., & Brønnick, K. (2013). Reading linear texts on paper versus computer screen: Effects on reading comprehension. International Journal of Educational Research, 58, 61–68.

Trivial Liberation? Shrubs and Fermentation, part 1 of 2

I have often wondered about the role food stories play in organizing people's food behaviors. I'm particularly interested in the intersection between exploratory experiments with food -- prone to being consumed by detail oriented foodie enthusiasm -- and more social justice motivated food actions. It seems that storytelling habits that reinforce trivial aspects of improvement along the food chain can risk undermining more liberatory efforts. At the same time, though, fun food enthusiasms can provide venues for practicing comfort with the significant challenges of liberating food production from the considerable oppression currently found in food production, harvesting, processing,  preparing, serving, and associated clean-up.

I have been considering how to engage those tensions recently as I have learned about a foodie trend that may be particularly characteristic of the current moment in our food culture: shrubs. 

Shrubs have many layers of taste and story. As I've discovered with pies, shrubs can be considered at a basic level to be something to do with fruits that might not otherwise be usable, which is how I discovered them. I returned home from my first visit to Georgia recently with the remnants of an impulse buy of strawberries: they weren't very good, but the amount of labor and resources that go into strawberries meant I didn't want to waste them. I realized that this was a moment to look into those delicious flavors I'd seen popping up at what appear to be a new manifestation of soda fountains bubbling up in hip neighborhoods. And this turned out to be a fruitful insight! Steeped with sugar and apple cider vinegar, which itself continues to ferment the sugar and fruit sugar along with whatever herbs and spices one adds, this process provides a potent flavoring, a spoonful of which can replace a whole can of soda in terms of flavor.

But it takes sugar! Here's where I find myself jumping on the schoolyard seesaw of food justifications. Sugar is such a high impact food, both for the people involved in growing and processing it, and on the ecologies it affects -- as the historical Wedgewood pattern pictured reminds us, from an era when sugar was recognized to be a significant driver of the Atlantic "triangle" trade that enslaved people (in part to create the sugar for tea to drive industrial workers, too). But processes like this kind of fermentation, although they may be making me buy more sugar at the outset, may use so much less over time, if I can replace sugar additions with smaller amounts of this more flavorful creation.  It's also more complex -- possibly even more DIFFICULT -- in flavor, so it's something one might appreciate in smaller servings anyways. But even if it also gives me an added use for citrus peels I would have otherwise discovered, still, it's SUGAR. This tendency to get stuck on a seesaw is a dialectical narrative structure I find instructive when thinking about the food movement. 

One of the things it helps highlight is how even if these foodie rabbit holes help familiarize people with many dynamics of food production they might otherwise not have noticed, no amount of personal choice is likely to create adequate change unless it is organized into collective movements to actually improve the conditions of food production and build supportive regulations. The plates with these Wedgewood patterns above supported Abolitionists as they both organized mass boycotts of sugar produced through slavery (involving both alternative sources in contexts where people were consuming what sounds like remarkably high amounts of sugar and also going without sugar at all in many cases) at the same time that they shaped the legislation that eventually abolished slavery in the U.K. and eventually the U.S. 

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

Orientation to very hard things

If you tell people something is going to be really hard, who responds to that invitation?

Can you figure out how to stage the signals letting people know that there will be difficulty -- so they are neither ambushed nor deterred, but invited with the assurance that they will have just as much support as they need to face the challenge?

I have been following this line of thought to figure out how to more successfully scaffold uncomfortable conversation about society and environment issues.

Traveling back to the U.S. reminds me how hard people are on each other, even (maybe especially) when they're trying to build up to doing hard things. So having watched a wave of appreciation for mothers swell the bandwidth of social media yesterday, I'd like to add my appreciation for the orientation provided by people who have done things they think others should try.

I can see how you went. I can witness and imagine some ways these things can be done, especially if I don't also have to worry about sticking exactly to your path(s). And especially then, figuring out the paths to take, I am even more grateful for the sign posts people might leave at difficult passages and choice points.

Orientation and Hospitality: On Celebrations of Place and Time (7th Anniversary Post)

What prompts the scripts that propel us into action? What is disorienting enough to stop us in our tracks?

Today marks OnFiction's seventh year, and the occasion of an anniversary (and a significant one -- will we itch to do something else now?) and also of my return home after a half year away gives me an opportunity to think about functions of the celebration of time and place.

Spending several months in a small foreign city where people mostly speak your language -- just more quietly -- is an excellent exercise in attuning to cues around you. And returning to one's home country -- cacophonous and loud with an overwhelming array of familiar cues makes one grasp for prioritizing tools to decide: what requires action?

I returned from my time in Aotearoa New Zealand via San Francisco, which, it turns out, shares a remarkable array of vegetation. Many plants were introduced to both places from South Africa, and in the beach neighborhood where I was staying with family, my favorite pohutukawa trees were everywhere, as pictured above (and here, in Gisborne, for contrast, and for the context of my tree posture). They were even blooming, throwing me even more completely into seasonal disorientation.

The pohutukawa is widely considered the Christmas tree of New Zealand, largely because its large red blossoms are most fully out around Christmas, the height of summer in the Southern hemisphere. As if it was not difficult enough to make a graceful transition from the starting up of the autumn term in Otago to the wrapping up of the spring term back in the U.S., Christmas trees that had really only just stopped flowering in the late summer of our very southerly latitude (where the trees are really not quite out by Christmas) were popping out in the sunny California April. 

Vegetation is always a force to be reckoned with, setting up association-filled backgrounds that are easy to underappreciate -- and the commanding nature of American spoken language is also a predictable attentional force to be reckoned with. Perhaps more surprising than these were the stars. Looking out over the Pacific when the sun went down over San Francisco, the beach seemed familiar -- but I found myself suddenly gripped with the realization that I would not be able to see southern hemisphere constellations! What was surprising about this reaction is the fact that I can barely recognize any of these constellations, making my attachment to them either purely nominal -- or based on an attachment to place details even more subtle than vegetation-noticing.

Over the next few weeks, I will be further exploring the idea of orientation, and how orientation can be provided through bodies of knowledge codified under the rules of hospitality (or, perhaps more abstractly, specific forms of discourse). Celebrations of time and place provide a profoundly useful starting place, because they feature qualities of orientation -- reminders of the past ways people have interacted with a place and each other, and often re-enactments of how this has taken place and changed form over time, along with celebrations of hopes for future plans in place and in the context of the continuity of community time. Reverse engineering the hospitality of celebrations may also suggest some of the common features of disorientation. Expecting a marginal view of those few constellations I can pick out from the far south, I am thrown off by the realization that my view has shifted (even if it has shifted back to a much more familiar view, this is the disoriented reaction that precedes the slower working out of how stars relate as they appear in the Pacific gloaming). Accustomed to quiet conversation, I am jolted by a thousand conversations that seem to be spoken as if I should be hearing them. A week later, I am re-oriented, having picked back up on the habits appropriate to familiar cues -- but I am also intrigued by that liminal space where habits can be seen unhabitually, and wonder how much that, too, is what we celebrate in the spectacle of things like anniversary?

Don't pitch over the edge! Introduction to short series on Applied Discourse Analysis

A recent study has helped put to rest clinicians' concerns that people who listen to internal dialogue might be crazy. This has been brought to my attention partly because of my recent preoccupation with understanding how stories work. My interest is in what I think of as "applied discourse analysis." Figuring out how stories are helping govern what happens in any given situation can be useful when those situations don't seem to be going well, and particularly when they seem not to be going well in part because of how we understand and govern them.

As I have noted in recent essays, I have spent the past season on a study trip meant to explore the way that stories of food security are operationalized in different agricultural systems. I will spend the next few weeks going over some of those stories, and I want to take this moment of introduction of this small series on applied discourse with a qualification and a related personal moment of insight.

My caveat has to do with what I will call "weak" versus "strong" applied discourse analysis. The injunction to "Change the story" can be used perniciously to suggest that various forms of suffering are largely matters of perception and perspective -- as if a positive attitude were all that might be needed to resolve oppression and the rampant inequalities that contribute to it. I want to be clear not only that this is NOT what I mean but also that I think it's worthwhile explicitly considering how to push back against such tendencies, and to figure out how to make this kind of storytelling more attentive to context.

If applied discourse analysis involves paying attention to the ways stories are being used to organize what happens -- and then seeing what can be done with that analysis to negotiate course corrections, the "weak" version is probably best exemplified by neoconservative attempts to praise romanticized stories of the (heroically individualistic) past while ignoring their bleaker aspects, a tendency well called out by Helaine Olen as "poor stories" in her analysis of this past week's weak efforts by Ross Douthat and David Brooks. She also points to the recently publicized discrepancies between The Little House on the Prairie stories that have been in circulation for the past 80 years and Laura Ingalls Wilder's original and more accurate stories of her experience. I find this a particularly salient example because of the number of people who have cited the Little House books as an influence on their decision to move out of the city and pursue the rural life. Imagine the implications of using, as an implicit instruction manual, a version that had all the potential hazards and challenges removed!

My related moment of insight (aftermath pictured above) has to do with the challenge of connecting critical stories to audiences who might be inclined to use them. Brooks and Douthat and ideologues spinning far worse stories about where society has gone wrong find audiences partly because they echo familiar moralistic tropes that people identify with: things have gone wrong (/vitality and power has been lost) because of people who are different from you (or, worse, people who represent impulses you would prefer to pretend don't exist). If we could only return to a version of the past that we remember as comfortable, easy, and going the way we wanted, things will be better. It's much harder for people to hear stories that tell them they need to make a change, put in effort toward goals they haven't entirely adopted as their own, or recognize other people's (competing) goals as valid and perhaps valuable. Except that there are moments that people NEED instructions, and these seem like the sweet spots for applied discourse analysis.

Stay to the left! Don't pitch over the edge!

On my odyssey to find the ruling narratives of global agricultural trade, I visited the Wanaka Agricultural and Pastoral Show this weekend. I have commuted by bicycle while living here, and this was my chance to finally use my mountain bike in the mountains. I was expecting a relatively tame track into town -- but ended up on an intermediate-skill rated single track trail for an exciting hour. Without any practice mountain biking, I watched and tried to mimic the moves my husband made (he's a much more experienced mountain biker) -- and tried to interpret his occasionally yelled pieces of advice.

The first ("stay to the left!") was incomprehensible. We were already on the left (this was a loop, and we were on the leftward "to town" section -- the sharper descent on the image above, rather than the switchback). Just as I was hoping he would stop to explain, a pile of stones appeared in my path with a track around it barely perceptible to the left. (Judging by several more of these piles of rocks or sticks that followed, the trail appeared to be under revision to be maximally bendy.) The bypass would have been much harder to see if I hadn't been primed. And the instructions were being repeated in my head as I needed them, so they were available. It was such a simple example, but it resonated with me for the rest of the ride: how do we get instructions to be available at the moment people might need to shift their path?

The descent down to the road level (above) involved a dauntingly steep path (especially for a bike loaded up with documentary equipment). "Well," said my husband, as we surveyed the only path down, "go carefully and don't pitch over the edge." Then he shot off down the hill.

"Easy for him to say," I obviously thought, but "don't pitch over the edge" ended up being much more helpful than you might expect. As with my approach to the waves learning to bellyboard, I found myself using that phrase at a number of challenging points in the short descent. As I would pause before a particularly impossible curve, I would calculate what angle seemed least likely to pitch me over the edge, and, like the heuristics one might use for billiards, this worked better than just shooting straight for the apparent goal.

Stories are almost always much more complex than we're able to recognize at first (as Douthat's analysis of past morality demonstrates). Applying our analyses is likely to run us into chapters of the stories that complicate what we think we understand. This makes it useful to find out what kinds of stories people are hearing and acting on as we dive in to figuring how to build "strong" or "rich" discourse analysis, a topic I will continue to explore over the next two weeks.