Research Bulletin: Reading and Student Stress

Mental health is a pressing concern for university students, with increasing numbers of students seeking mental health services in recent years. Dr. Shelby Levine and colleagues (2020) investigated whether recreational reading could improve the mental health of students by helping them fulfill core psychological needs. They hypothesized that recreational reading could decrease feelings of isolation and low competence, and serve as a form of resistance against restrictive academic environments.
At the beginning of the academic year, 201 college students reported their psychological distress, recreational reading goals, and autonomous motivation to read (i.e., of their own volition). At the end of the year, psychological distress and recreational reading achievements were measured again. The researchers discovered that psychological distress was much greater in all students at the end of the year. However, those who read more books had a smaller increase in distress than those who had read less. Further, autonomous motivation to read predicted a more ambitious reading goal, as well as more books completed by the end of the year. Lastly, the more books students read, the less frustrated they felt in terms of core needs, which led to less distress.
The authors conclude that fostering an intrinsic love of recreational reading in children and youth should be a key goal for parents and teachers. Based on their findings, promoting and supporting a love for reading could be an effective way to help students cope with the stressors of university.

Post by Shyamaly Vasuthevan

* For a copy of the original article, please contact R. Mar (see profile for e-mail).
 
Photo by Pixabay from Pexels. 

Research Bulletin: Are Meaningful Narratives More Likely to Promote Social Cognition?

Although a great deal of research has examined whether stories help to promote social cognition, most of this work has been on adults and not delved much into different types of stories. Hannah N. M. De Mulder and colleagues (2022) took it upon themselves to examine this question in adolescents, with a focus on comparing different modalities of presentation (i.e., books, television, film), and hedonic narratives to eudaimonic ones. Eudaimonic narratives prompt audiences to consider deep truths about the world, conveying a sense of meaning and often eliciting experiences of “being moved” by the story (Oliver & Raney, 2011). In contrast, hedonic narratives are focused on providing pleasure for audiences, such as positive emotions and excitement. The researchers asked 126 children aged 8 to 16 how often they read books (or watched television/film) that was hedonic or eudaimonic in nature, and also measured their social abilities in three different ways (self-report, emotion recognition, and the ability to infer mental states). Using a Bayesian approach to analyzing their data, they evaluated whether the data was more or less consistent with several different possibilities. In this population of adolescents, they found little consistent evidence that books, TV, and film predict better social abilities. However, they did observe that exposure to meaningful narratives was associated with better social skills, in particular for television and film. This work highlights the importance of studying a variety of populations, and types of media, when researching the relation between stories and social cognition.

References

De Mulder, H. N. M., Hakemulder, F., Klaassen, F., Junge, C. M. M., Hoijtink, H., & van Berkum, J. J. A. (2022). Figuring Out What They Feel: Exposure to eudaimonic narrative Fiction is related to mentalizing ability. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 16, 242–258.

Oliver, M. B., & Raney, A. A. (2011). Entertainment as pleasurable and meaningful: Identifying hedonic and eudaimonic motivations for entertainment consumption. Journal of Communication, 61, 984–1004.

Post by Raymond Mar
 
* For a copy of the original article, please contact R. Mar (see profile for e-mail).
 
Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko on Pexels

Health from Fiction

Over the years the writers of articles for OnFiction have argued that short stories and novels, as well as plays, films, and nowadays some video games, offer us insights into the minds of others and into the nature of human interactions. 

A parallel set of arguments has been offered in our understanding of human health and illness. Among the foremost contributors here has been Ad Kaptain, a medical psychologist at Leiden University Medical Centre in Belgium. Some of his articles are listed below.

 

Among Kaptein’s interests is in how people experience being ill. One of his ideas is that empathy from doctors and nursing staff can have a beneficial effect on the wellbeing and recovery of patients. Kaptein is convinced that literature can help to improve empathy in those working in healthcare.

 

One of the works that Kaptain discusses in an article that he published in 2022, in the Journal of Health Psychology, is Margaret Edson’s Wit: “the Pulitzer prize winning novel/play about coping with ovarian cancer and the associated struggle between patient and health care providers” (p. 1618). Another work that he discusses is Thomas Bernhard’s The Breath, from which he quotes this: “ … but it was impossible to speak to them …The doctors on the ward-round never did anything to enlighten their patients in the death ward, and in consequence all three patients were effectively abandoned, both medically and morally.” Then comes the following: “Every day they appeared in front of my bed, a white wall of unconcern in which no trace of humanity was discernable” (p. 1619).

 

Kaptain refers to the work of our research group, in which we have found that engaging with fiction can enable people to increase their empathy (see e.g. Mar 2018). Perhaps “people” might include health care providers of the kind that are referred to in works such as Edson’s Wit and Bernhard’s The Breath.

 

Kaptein A. A. et al. (2018) Start making sense: Art informing health psychology. Health Psychology Open 5: 1–13.

 

Kaptein A. A. et al. (2020) Heart in Art: cardiovascular diseases in novels, films, and paintings. Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine 15: 2.

 

Kaptain, A. A. (2022). Novels as data: Health humanities and health psychology. Journal of Health Psychology, 27, 1615-1625.

 

Mar, R. A. (2018). Evaluating whether stories can promote social cognition: Introducing the Social Processes and Content Entrained by Narrative (SPaCEN) framework. Discourse Processes, 5/6, 454–479.

Research Bulletin: Fiction and Mental Inferencing in a Latin American Sample

Theory of Mind, or mentalizing, is an aspect of cognitive empathy that refers to the ability to understand that others have mental states and perspectives that may be different from one’s own. Previous research has established a link between reading fiction and empathy (e.g., Fong et al., 2013). Exposure to fiction versus non-fiction is associated with higher scores on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes task (RMET; Baron-Cohen et al., 2001), an ability task measuring Theory of Mind (Mar et al., 2006). A recent study by Tabullo and colleagues (2018) explored this relationship further. In a cross-cultural replication, the authors enlisted a Latin American sample of Spanish-speaking Argentinians to examine associations among fiction exposure, reading habits, trait empathy, and Theory of Mind. Participants self-reported their reading habits and empathy, and completed a series of tasks measuring their exposure to fiction and Theory of Mind ability.

 

Although past studies found a positive association between exposure to fiction and Theory of Mind, this group found this result replicated only for their male participants. Higher scores for the RMET (Baron-Cohen et al., 2001), were associated with higher scores for fiction exposure, but only for males. For women, the opposite was observed. This sex difference has not been previously observed in past studies, and so this finding requires replication and further exploration. Unfortunately, one limitation OF this study is the relatively few male participants in the sample (n = 71; n = 137 females). Future studies should further investigate possible sex differences when examining the relation between reading fiction and Theory of Mind.

References:

Baron-Cohen, S., Wheelwright, S., Hill, J., Raste, Y., & Plumb, I. (2001). The “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” Test revised version: a study with normal adults, and adults with Asperger syndrome or high-functioning autism. The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry and Allied Disciplines, 42(2), 241-251.
 

Fong, K., Mullin, J. B., & Mar, R. A. (2013). What you read matters: The role of fiction genre in predicting interpersonal sensitivity. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 7(4), 370–376. 

 

Tabullo, A. J., Jimenez, V. A. N., & Garcia, C. S. (2018). Associations between fiction reading, trait empathy, and theory of mind ability. International Journal of Psychology & Psychological Therapy, 18(3), 353-370.

Photo by Polina Zimmerman from Pexels: https://www.pexels.com/photo/photo-of-woman-reading-book-3747468/
Post by Valeria Hernandez

Photo by Polina Zimmerman from Pexels: https://www.pexels.com/photo/photo-of-woman-reading-book-3747468/
* For a copy of the original article, please contact R. Mar (see profile for e-mail).

 

Photo by Polina Zimmerman from Pexels

 tjkeo by Polina Zimmerman from Pexels: https://www.pexels.com/photo/photo-of-woman-reading-book-3747468/Photo by Polina Zimmerman from Pexels: https://www.pexels.com/photo/photo-of-woman-reading-book-3747468/

Photo by Polina Zimmerman from Pexels: https://www.pexels.com/photo/photo-of-woman-reading-book-3747468/

Our Souls At Night

The idea of “schema” was central to Frederic Bartlett’s book of 1932, Remembering, where he described a series of experiments in which people were asked to read a story, or to look at a picture, and then reproduce it either immediately or later. Bartlett’s proposal was that remembering is an activity based not on anything like a photograph or recording, but on an understanding—schema—of how, in a way that is familiar to a person and within a society, one does certain kinds of actions like getting onto a train, or sitting down with others for a meal, plus an emotional attitude together with a rather small amount of detail. In Art and Illusion, Ernst Gombrich (1960) took this idea into an understanding of representational painting which, he said, is based on schema plus correction: for instance, a general idea of what a mountain, or a house, or a person might look like, together with a correction so that it becomes more specific or, in the case of some paintings, new and surprising. 

 

Kent Haruf’s novel of 2015, Our Souls at Night is also based on a schema: our idea of what it is for two people to have an affair. In the first chapter of the book, we are introduced to the novel’s protagonist, the elderly widow, Addie Moore, who lives in a small town in Colorado. She walks over to the house, one block away, of another elderly person: a widower, Louis Waters, whom she knows a little bit but not at all well.  Invited in, she tells him that she won’t stay long, then says that she is getting cold feet. She then says this.

 

I wonder if you would consider coming to my house sometimes to sleep with me… I mean we’re both alone. We’ve been by ourselves for too long. For years. I’m lonely. I think you might be too. I wonder if you would come and sleep in the night with me. And talk.

 

The usual schema we might have of going to bed with someone, or having an affair, receives a correction. Addie says to Louis that she means what she says. “I’m not talking about sex" she says but "lying warm in bed, companionably.”

 

At first, Louis makes his visits late in the evening, when he is unlikely to be seen. Addie and he try to keep their arrangement secret. As they talk with each other about their marriages, their concerns, they find themselves becoming closer. One event which Addie recounted had been especially hard. Her five-year old daughter, Connie, had been playing in the back yard with her elder brother, Gene, and had run out into the street, had been hit by a car and died. The event had been devastating for Addie’s marriage and devastating for Gene. Addie became the target of both her husband’s and her son’s resentments.

 

Other people in the town start to notice Addie’s and Louis’s relationship and to talk about it; no longer a secret. The turning point of the novel occurs when Gene asks Addie to look after his young son, Jamie, for a while, because his wife has left him. Jamie is a rather neglected child, but Louis takes to him, looks after him as a parent might, buys him a dog, of which the boy becomes fond. 

 

What are your schemas for growing older, for families, for parental relationships, for affairs? 

 

What happens next in this novel? Do Addie and Louis get round to sex? What might Jamie think of what is going on? Maybe I should tell you. Maybe we should gossip. What do you think?

 

Frederic Bartlett (1932). Remembering: A study in experimental and social psychology. Cambridge University Press.

Ernst Gombrich (1960). Art and illusion. Phaidon.

Kent Haruf (2015). Our souls at night. Knopf.

 

 

 

 

  

Engagement in Reading

Birte Thissen, with colleagues Winfried Menninghaus (Director of the Department of Language and Literature at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, in Frankfurt, Germany), and Wolff Schlotz, have recently published an article which brings together Mihaly Csikszentmihali’s concept of flow and the activity of reading fiction. 

 

Flow is full engagement in what one is doing. Csikszentmihalyi illustrated this by depicting Rico Medelin who worked in a factory that made movie projectors. His job was on an assembly line and, as each part-made projector came along, the operation he had to do was supposed to take 43 seconds. He had to do this 600 times a day, and he’d been in this job for five years. Many of us would not have been able to do this for so long, but Rico had analyzed the task, and thought about it; worked out how to use his tools and perform his task better and more quickly so that, in his best average over a day, he had completed each task for each unit in two thirds of the time required. "It is better than anything else," said Rico. "It's better than watching TV” (p. 39-40). Another person who was interviewed was a 62 year old woman who enjoyed tending her cows and orchard. "I find a special satisfaction in caring for the plants," she said. "I like to see them grow each day" (p. 55). A mother said about reading with her young daughter: "She reads to me, and I read to her, and that's a time when I sort of lose touch with the rest of the world. I'm totally absorbed in what I'm doing" (p. 53).

 

In this state of flow, which Csikszentmihalyi also calls "optimal experience," a person has a sense of purpose and creativity, so that the self and the activity merge. It’s not a matter of waiting for something pleasant to come along, but of setting yourself goals, analyzing and solving problems, creating an activity that is meaningful. 

 

In their study, Thissen, Menninghaus and Schlotz asked whether this idea applied to the reading of fiction. They had 373 people, between 18 and 81 years of age, recruited from an online survey in two large bookstores, read a German translation of Homer’s “Scylla and Charybdis,” Chapter 12 of Odysseus. They found that the experience of flow, as measured by a newly created 27-item scale, was a significant predictor of a feeling of presence in the story world, of identification with the protagonist, of enjoyment of reading, and of comprehension of the story. Here’s how the authors end the abstract of their paper.

 

Although, to date, the concept of flow has played only a minor role in research on fiction reading, our results suggest that it deserves being integrated into future theoretical frameworks and empirical investigations of positive reading experiences.

 

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. New York: Harper Collins.

 

Homer (762 BCE). The Odyssey. Harmondsworth: Penguin (current edition 1946).

 

Thissen, B. A. K., Menninghaus, W., & Schlotz, W. (2020). The pleasures of reading fiction explained by flow, presence, identification, suspense, and cognitive involvement. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, Advanced online publication, November doi:10.1037/aca0000367

Reflection

 

Mollie Panter-Downes became well known for her column in the New Yorker on life in London during World War II (republished as London War Notes). Her fifth novel, One Fine Day, came out in 1947. Its title might have been One Day, because that’s what it is: a day in the life of a family who live in an aging house, somewhere south-west of London, one year after the end of the War. 

 

Here's the plot. Eight o’clock in the morning, the sun is shining. Laura and Stephen Marshall at breakfast. Stephen leaves the house, drives to the station to go up on the train to London, where he works. Their twelve-year old daughter Victoria goes to school. Laura, age 38, the main protagonist, goes on a bus to do some shopping in a nearby town. Provisions in short supply, coupons needed. She returns; does some stuff around the house, and in the garden, then in the afternoon rides on her bicycle to collect the family dog who has wandered off. Having collected him from where he sometimes goes, to a gypsy who lives with several dogs in an abandoned railway carriage, she climbs a small hill, and looks out over the countryside. She lies on the grass, falls asleep, with the dog on a lead beside her. It’s early evening when Victoria returns, having had tea with her friend Mouse Watson. Her mother isn’t home. Later, Stephen comes back from work. Laura still not home. Victoria finds some fish and cooks it. She and her father eat it for dinner. Both of them worried. Where can she be? Laura is woken by a noise. It’s a hiker whom she’d seen on the bus that morning. She sees how late it is; thinks of something she was going to tell her husband but can’t remember what. Thinks she’d better hurry home. That’s it. 

 

The middle of the novel is taken up with episodes, Laura’s meetings with people such as a working class family one of whom, George, is extraordinarily handsome, and might be able to do a bit of gardening but can’t because he’s going off elsewhere, and the Vicar, “a saint who had the misfortune to sound like a bore.” Incidents occur. And memories: Laura remembers a man she might have married but feels relieved that she did not. She sees huts that Canadian soldiers had lived in, sees holes in a wall where army trucks had bashed through. She has thoughts about this house and that one. It’s hard to imagine anything more redolent—I think that’s the word—of South-of-England upper-middle-class life in the aftermath of World War II. One could re-arrange some of the episodes and meetings without making much difference, because the sequence—morning, afternoon, evening—is not what this novel is about. At a deeper level it’s reflection: by Mollie, by Laura (with smaller pieces by Victoria and Stephen), and by us readers, on what it is to be human, on what our relationships within ourselves and with each other are all about.

 

For me the novel succeeded in prompting reflection, but with some parts that didn’t quite work. And it is so very, very, English. But the inwardness did work, somewhat like Virginia Woolf, but warmer, more interpersonal.

 

In his obituary of Mollie Panter-Downes, in the third of February 1997 issue of The Independent, Anthony Bailey reported her as saying, "I'm a reporter. I can't invent." What she was doing however was something that poets of the Tang Era in China did. Not invention, but perception of episodes in the world that are reflected in inner consciousness and writing (see OnFiction: “Patterns in the World and in the Mind,’ 9 January 2012; you can reach it by doing a search for “Tang” on the OnFiction home page). In Mollie Panter-Downes’s case, although some of her world is to do with nature, predominately it’s people.

 

Panter-Downes, M. (1947). One fine day. Current edition: London: Virago, 1985).

Panter-Downes, M. (2004). London war notes. London: Persephone.

 

Clarice Lispector

The novella, The Hour of the Star, by Clarice Lispector, is unlike anything else I have read. This review can be thought of as following on from my previous post about authors hearing the voices of their characters, and characters having independent agency. It’s about the lives of someone called Rodrigo, an author-narrator who starts by thinking of writing a book (the one you would have in your hands as you read The Hour of the Star) and the book’s protagonist, Macabéa, a nineteen-year-old woman, who is thin and not good-looking, who grew up a very poor area in the north-east of Brazil, who had only three years at school, then moved to Rio de Janeiro to be employed as a typist.

Clarise Lispector was born in 1920, in the Ukraine, and her family moved to this same area in the north-east of Brazil, before moving to Rio de Janeiro.

In the story Macabéa meets the arrogant Olímpico, with whom she falls in love. On page 38, the author-narrator says of him: “He had, I just discovered, inside of him, the hard seed of evil.” Later we read that he had killed someone in the north-east of Brazil, and that he was also a thief. A few pages later we read that when walking along with Macabéa, Olímpico says he is strong, so he lifts her into the air. She is euphoric: “what it’s like to fly in an aeroplane” she thinks. Then he dumps her in the mud. Then, another few pages on, Olímpico says to her: “are you just pretending to be an idiot or are you actually an idiot?” Macobéa: “I’m not sure what I am, I think I’m a little … what? … “I mean I’m not quite sure what I am.”

Then Olímpico goes off with Glória, a blond chubby girl who works in the same office as Macabéa. Feeling guilty, Glória recommends that Macabéa should visit a fortune teller, Madame Carlota, who sees in Macabéa’s cards that her life has been and continues to be horrible. Then she relents and tells her client that her life will be wonderful, that she will be courted and marry someone called Hans. Macabéa is enchanted. As she leaves the fortune teller’s place, and steps off the pavement, she is run over and killed by a large and expensive Mercedes.

As Colm Tóibín wrote in a very engaging review: 

In October 1977, shortly before her death, she [Lispector] published the novella The Hour of the Star in which all her talents and eccentricities merged and folded in a densely self-conscious narrative dealing with the difficulty and odd pleasures of storytelling and then proceeding, when it could, to tell the story of Macabéa, a woman who, Lispector told an interviewer, "was so poor that all she ate were hot dogs". But she made clear that this was "not the story, though. The story is about a crushed innocence, about an anonymous misery." [Then], Lispector told a TV interviewer: "I went to a fortune-teller who told me about all kinds of good things that were about to happen to me, and on the way home in the taxi I thought it'd be really funny if a taxi hit me and ran me over and I died after hearing all those good things.”

But this novella isn’t about the plot. It’s about how Lispector the writer, created Rodrigo, the author-narrator, who created Macabéa as a character, and how this character in turn seems to take part in the process of creating not just author-narrator Rodrigo but also, perhaps, in a certain kind of way, Lispector. 

If we knew that that someone had decided to enter the police, or to be shop assistant or office worker, we might think that she or he had taken a decision, to become a person of a certain kind and that, in turn, the role she or he has taken on would shape something in that person. But an original idea of this novella, is that a somewhat similar process can occur with a writer and the story and characters that the writer decides to create. As we read on page 13 the author-narrator says: 

I have a fidgety character on my hands who escapes me at every turn expecting me to retrieve her … I see that north-eastern girl looking in the mirror and—a ruffle of the drum—in the mirror appears my weary and unshaven face. We’re that interchangeable.

Then on page 61 the author-narrator says to his readers:

As for me I’m tired. Maybe of the company of Macabéa, Glória, Olímpico… I have to interrupt this story for about three days … For the last three days, alone, without characters, I depersonalize myself … as if taking off my clothes … and now I emerge and miss Macabéa. Let’s continue.

But this novella is not just about this fascinating conversation among the writer, the author-narrator, the characters, and ourselves as readers. It’s a meditation on the nature of human life. It’s about how much we understand about others or understand about ourselves.

Clarice Lispector (2011). The hour of the star (second edition, with introduction by Colm Tóibín) (B. Moser, Trans.). New York: New Directions.

Colm Tóibín (2014) Clarice Lispector's The Hour of the Star is as bewildering as it is brilliant. The Guardian, 18 January.

The Wire

In OnFiction’s series of television series, we ought perhaps to have started with the series that really started it all: “The Wire.” It was conceived by David Simon, began in 2002, and ran for five seasons. Simon had worked for several years as a journalist on the newspaper, The Baltimore Sun, researching and writing about Baltimore’s police. Although he pitched “The Wire” to Home Box Office (HBO) as a cop show, as Margaret Talbot explains in her New Yorker article, “Stealing Life,” Simon said he thought about it as like a novel, in which each episode would be a chapter. A season would involve the development of character, an overall plot, perhaps with some digressions. 

One focus of “The Wire,” set in Baltimore, is on organizations in which not only do misunderstandings occur, but mistakes are made. Here the police are mirrored by a local drug gang. In both, higher-ups administer and sometimes take advantage of their positions. But, in these organizations, comradeship occurs. In this way, as police detectives, there are Bunk and his friend McNulty (seen in this image). Then one step up, Lieutenant Cedric Daniels, who gains a growing respect. Then further steps up, people with more power and less respect. In the drug gang’s organization, there’s a comparable hierarchy. The first season’s plot is the contest between these two organizations. 

Near the beginning of the first episode of the first season we are in a courtroom, where a man at the gang’s mid-level, D’Angelo, is accused of having shot and killed someone (an underling drug-dealer in the gang). A witness changes testimony and D’Angelo is acquitted. Because getting him off had cost the gang time and money, he is demoted. The person who administers this is Stringer Bell, the gang’s organization person. Above him is the leader, Avon Barksdale (a companion of sorts to Bell). Both of them are very careful to avoid being seen or known by anyone in the police. (Although the gang’s business is of selling drugs, neither of these two, of course, ever indulges.) 

The title of the series refers to the police’s wire-tapping into telephone conversations among members of the drug-dealing gang. As Margaret Talbot points out, there’s also the implication that, as we watch, we are also tapping into the lives of these two groups of people. One effect, for viewers, is a growing understanding and empathy for some of the principal characters in both the police and the gang.

Most of the people on the show are black. This is another focus, with the issue of how problematic it can be to live in working-class American cities: one of the preoccupations of the principal author, David Simon. 

Several groups of immigrants—Irish, Italian, Jewish—included people who, finding life in the New World at first very difficult, took part in illegal activities. They aspired to make enough money so that their children could go to college and lead middle-class lives. Because of institutionalized prejudice, this kind of issue has been far more problematic for black people, whose ancestors did not immigrate: they were transported. (How’s that for illegality?) In this show, in Episode 8, of the first season, entitled “The Lesson,” we see Stringer Bell taking a class in economics.

 “The Wire” enabled television series-watching to be taken seriously, in the way that reading novels and watching certain kinds of films have become. And, as I wrote in OnFiction’s first review of television series (24 March 2020): “As Jessica Black and Jennifer Barnes (2015) have shown … a prize-winning television series can have the same kinds of effects as reading fiction in enabling people to increase their empathy and understanding of others.”

Jessica Black & Jennifer Barnes (2015). Fiction and social cognition: The effect of viewing award-winning television dramas on theory of mind. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 9, 423-429.

Margaret Talbot “Stealing Life,” The New Yorker, 15 October 2007.

Borgen

Borgen (which means “The Castle,” nickname for the building in Copenhagen that contains the Parliament, Prime Minister’s office, and Supreme Court) is a Danish series that is rather different from the usual kind aired on television. It has two kinds of focus. One is on gender and its implications in democratic political systems. The second is on how a job that is important, that demands unremitting involvement, can affect a person inwardly, and can affect that person’s relationships not just with others at work, but also with family and friends. So, as in many of the better kinds of novel, the central issue is character. 

The protagonist in the series is Birgitte Nyborg, played by Sidse Babett Knudsen. Aged about 40, she is leader of a centrist party, the Moderates. A second protagonist is an ambitious television journalist, Katrine Fønsmark, played by Birgitte Hjort Sørensen. Although the series is about women, the writing team, Adam Price, Jeppe Gjervig Gram, and Tobias Lindholm, is all male. In an interview, Adam Price, the series originator, said that women in public life are not as unusual in Denmark as in some other places, and also that he thought the series would never travel beyond its home country. But it has; it’s been enthusiastically reviewed and widely appreciated.

Episode One of the first season starts with the approach of an election, with the Liberal Party currently in power and the main opposition, Labour Party, with similar prospects of winning. The Moderates seem out of the race. Then it turns out that Katrine Fønsmark has been having an affair with the current Prime Minister’s chief of staff, who dies during one of their meetings. On clearing up the chief of staff’s belongings, a receipt is found which reveals the Prime Minister’s financial wrongdoing. The receipt is given to Nyborg who refuses to have anything to do with it. Then it’s given to the Labour leader who very much likes showing off and presents it in a televised debate. Liberal and Labour support plummet.  Suddenly, it seems Nyborg might become the new Prime Minister.

In a world in which so many national leaders are older men it may be appealing that political decisions might be made by principled women, of whom there are some such as Angela Merkel. In this series, Knudsen plays Nyborg as someone who is thoughtful, who sometimes gets cross, but in personality is kind and considerate. As Knudsen acts this part we, in the audience, often see, in a smile at someone, or in a moment of hesitation, a depiction of a person whom we would very much appreciate as a political leader. And beneath this, as a principle of fiction, we are invited to think what this might mean for our understandings of political democracies, and of other people more generally, and of our selves. 

Borgen (2010-2013, three-season television series). Written by Adam Price, Jeppe Gjervig Gram, and Tobias Lindholm. Denmark. (Available on services such as Apple TV.)

Offspring

In these weeks of self isolation and social distancing with the corona virus pandemic what one may like, in the late evening, is a television series to watch before one goes to bed. Dating from 2002, when HBO (Home Box Office) an American television network started to broadcast The Wire, such series started, it seems, to have moved from soap operas to dramas that are more like novels, some with artistic features. Perhaps, indeed now, the television series released in episodes, in something like the way that novels used to be published in the nineteenth century, has become the print-novel’s newly embodied follow-up. As Jessica Black and Jennifer Barnes (2015) have shown, moreover, watching a prize-winning television series, can have the same kinds of effects as reading fiction in enabling people to increase their empathy and understanding of others (theory of mind). 

So this week, and for some weeks to follow, I’ll offer suggestions with mini-reviews of some series that seem to me as good and worthwhile as many kinds of modern novel.

For this first week, I suggest Offspring, an Australian television show conceived and written by Debra Oswald with two collaborators, which started in 2010 and runs through seven seasons, with 85 episodes, available on Netflix. The main protagonist in the series is Dr Nina Proudman (played by Asher Keddie, centre-left in this picture). At the beginning she is in her early thirties, an obstetrician whose professional skills range from super-competent to absolutely brilliant. And there are lots of engaging scenes of babies being born (so much better than the frequent televisual fare of men with guns). The second protagonist is her older sister, Billie Proudman (played by Kat Stewart, top right-hand corner in the picture); very out-there, sexy, sometimes aggressive, sometimes affectionate. 

Along with her professional activities, Nina, sometimes known as Nins, is usually in a bit of muddle personally. She has problems with her family (her sister Billie, her brother Jimmy, her mum, and her dad). She has friendly, and often very funny, interactions with other doctors, and with nurses, in her workplace, a hospital in Melbourne. And she falls love with people in ways that don’t quite work out.

What is special, however, about this series, is its focus is on two aspects that had not quite emerged in the Nineteenth-Century novel. One of these—the main one—is Nina’s inner thoughts, edited into the action in a perfect way, so that although they are visualized and often spoken out-loud by the actress (Asher Keddie), as an audience member one knows instantly that they are Nina’s thoughts, memories, scenes of imagination, fantasies, and not aspects of her ongoing interactions with others. If we had been able to overhear Virginia Woolf, as she time-travelled from 1925 when she published Mrs Dalloway, to the first episode of Offspring, in 2010, we might have heard her whisper: “Yes.” The second aspect is the focus, not on events, not on what goes well or badly (although good and bad events happen), but on the relationships among the characters, which emerge and evolve. Lovely.   

Jessica Black & Jennifer Barnes (2015). Fiction and social cognition: The effect of viewing award-winning television dramas on theory of mind. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 9, 423-429.

Debra Oswald, John Edwards, & Imogen Banks (2010-2017). Offspring. Network 10. 

David Simon (2002). The wire. HBO Television Network.

Virginia Woolf (1925). Mrs Dalloway. London: Hogarth Press.