Kate Chopin's The Awakening

The Awakening, published by Kate Chopin when she was 49 years old, has become a literary classic, and an influential feminist novella. 

Here’s a brief summary. Edna Pontillier is on vacation on Grand Isle with her husband Léonce. In the novella’s eighth paragraph she walks up from a beach with Robert LeBrun, after bathing in the warm Caribbean Sea. On the island she also meets Adèle Ratignolle, mother of three small children, the first person with whom she ever talks about her feelings. Although to start with, Edna cannot swim, she learns to do so and feels liberated. She starts to think of rejecting assigned roles. By the end of the vacation, Edna and Léonce have grown apart, while she and Robert have grown close. To avoid what might happen, Robert moves to Mexico. Back in New Orleans, where she lives, Edna relinquishes her role as housewife, and becomes serious about her painting. Léonce takes a long business trip to New York, his mother looks after the couple’s two young children, and Edna moves into a place she calls the pigeon house. She spends a night with a man who’s a substitute for Robert, whom she thinks is still in Mexico. But he returns and visits her. After some awkward meetings, she kisses him. Although she says that he “must have forgotten that she was Léonce Pontillier’s wife,” she and Robert both declare their love for each other. Then a servant brings a message to say that Adèle Ratignolle is sick, so Edna goes to see her. When Edna returns, she finds a note from Robert. It says: “I love you. Good by—because I love you.” She realizes that he has departed, so she will be solitary. She returns to Grand Isle, removes her clothes, and swims out to sea. 

 

As well as this novella, Kate Chopin is known for her short stories. Her principal literary influence was Guy de Maupassant (whom she first read when she was about 35). “I read his stories,” she said, “I marvelled at them.” He spoke to her directly and intimately. She admired his escape from tradition, his rejection of hypocrisy. Her first short story was published when she was 39.

 

Although there had been myths, fables, and fairy tales, the literary short story dates back perhaps to 1842: Nikolai Gogol’s “The Overcoat.” The short story can be compared with the sonnet: eight lines, four lines, and two lines, with potential turning points between each set, after which we can see what had gone before in a new way. In Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” (1894) for instance, the protagonist first hears that her husband has died in a railway accident. She breaks down in tears, then goes to her room to be alone. There—turning point—she experiences “something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What was it? She did not know; it was too subtle and elusive to name”—a feeling of freedom. Then, towards the end of the story, she leaves her room and goes downstairs. There’s a turning of a key in the front door lock—final turning point—her husband returns; she dies of a heart attack.

 

In The Awakening, Kate Chopin uses techniques that are typical of poetry. Although she does this all the way through, an instance is in Chapter 10, when Edna finds she can swim, metaphors include: sea—liberation, learning to swim—accomplishment, actions previously not taken—actions that can now be taken, indoors is containment—outside are possibilities, lying in a hammock—comfort, coziness. There are also reiterated scenes of sleeping and waking. In addition, there are juxtapositions and contrasts. In Chapter 10, Edna’s walk down to the beach with Léonce contrasts with her return with Robert. In a more distant comparison, the novella’s first scene with Edna’s return from bathing connects with its last scene in which she swims out to sea. There are also scenes of emotion as inwardly experienced. For instance, as Edna finds herself able to swim “a feeling of exultation overtook her.” Early versions of such feelings tend to be vague. They then become more distinct; so exultation transforms into a feeling of freedom from the role into which Edna has been cast: wife and mother.

 

Kate Chopin. (1894). “The dream of an hour.” In P. Knights (Ed.), Kate Chopin The awakening and other stories(pp. 259-261). Oxford: Oxford University Press (current edition, 2000).

 

Kate Chopin (1899). The awakening. In P. Knights (Ed.), Kate Chopin The awakening and other stories (pp. 3-128). Oxford: Oxford University Press (current edition, 2000).

 

Nicolai Gogol (1842). “The overcoat” (C. Garnett, Trans.). In The overcoat and other stories (pp. 3-51). London: Chatto & Windus (current edition 1923).

 

Andrea Levy's Short Stories

As with sonnets, some short stories have turning points. Andrea Levy’s “Deborah” has three. This story begins with a depiction of childhood play as good or better, on this, than anything I have read. Deborah is a friend of the narrator, Fern, whose mum, we infer, is an immigrant from Jamaica. Both girls are nine years old. They live a little way from each other on the ground floor of a block of council flats in Highbury, just north of Islington, in London. Deborah is one of a large family of twelve or so. She “has pale blue eyes” and “pink cheeks.” She sleeps with siblings in a room that has lots of beds. She is naughty, but also endearing, can always get a ball back when it is lost, hops over fences, can jump down ten stairs at a time. She loves to play with Fern. (What follow here are spoilers; if you don’t like these, please don’t read on.)

Kenny, a much younger boy, lives on the third floor of the flats; “he was ginger and cried if you called him carrot.” He follows Deborah and Fern when he can. They sometimes let him come along, because—being scruffy and unattractive—he doesn’t have anyone else to play with. The three of them go into the flat where Deborah lives, into the room with lots of beds. It’s untidy: “Shoes, knickers and socks where pillows should be.” Instead of a light bulb, in the middle of the ceiling there’s a bundle of electric wires and flex, with leads going everywhere. The three kids play a game of showing each other their bums. Kenny is totally overexcited. He jumps up and down on a bed, waving his arms. By mistake, he knocks down the bundle of flex, and bits of the ceiling fall down, too.

“Kenny, look what you’ve done,” shouts Fern.

“I never did anything … I never touched nothing,” says Kenny.

Then comes the first turning point. Deborah burrows under a bed, on the floor, against the wall, sucks her thumb like a baby. Fern asks her to come out, but she won’t. Kenny calls her “scaredy cat” and “cry baby.” Fern then leaves “the room with the plaster and the dust and the black electric leads like spiders’ legs.”

At a second turning point, later that day, Fern sees Kenny naked. “His mouth … open as if screaming but with no sound coming out.” He has gashes and cuts all over his body, some of them oozing blood. Then she sees Deborah, walking after him, grinning, carrying a piece of flex with spikey metal ends. 

Deborah is then no longer to be seen. Adults appear. They want to know where she’s gone. Deborah’s dad shouts, “when I get hold of her I’ll kill her.”

The police are called. Kenny is taken off in an ambulance.

In the story’s last paragraph comes the third turning point. It’s how Fern finds Deborah in a secret hiding place the two of them have, with her cardigan “pulled up over her head … in front of her face. She was sucking her thumb and rocking gently backwards and forwards. And coming out from between her legs was a small trickle of piss.”  

Although in the early part of the story it’s clear that Deborah does things she shouldn’t, we find that she has also learned what it is to be a bully. Beaten up perhaps by her father, or mother, perhaps by others, she beats up Kenny. 

Another story in this collection is “That Polite Way that English People Have,” about a woman who emigrates to England from Jamaica. She has saved up to travel first class on a ship. She isn’t (quite) picked up by a posh-looking Englishman. He asks her if she would like a night cap. She says she doesn’t sleep with anything on her head. But Petal, another Jamaican woman, allows herself to be picked up. Now a turning point: in the boat’s first-class dining room, the posh man takes his meals with Petal, offers her cigarettes from a silver case. She whispers in his ear, and giggles. The narrator saw “the other English people looking at her [Petal] from the corner of their eyes. They were not used to someone as low class as she sitting right next to them … like she was as good as them.” 

A sense of humanity emanates from the essay and stories in this book by Andrea Levy who died about a year ago. In her stories, I think, she is wondering how we humans often seem unable sometimes to get on with each other. In the story “Deborah,” the turning points enable us to enter the mind of a child who has been abused. In other stories, turning points are based on shocks about how people do things, say things, or fail to say things, which indicate that they think it inappropriate for another person to receive the kind of consideration they would like for themselves. Most frequently this is based on social class or culture. But does that make it any better?

Andrea Levy (2014) Six Stories and an Essay. London: Headline.

"By Numbers" short story by Keith Oatley

Rosalind was inordinately beautiful. She was a high-school teacher of mathematics where, although there were geometry and algebra, in her classes, calculations came top. When shopping, she sought out bargains. Back home, she would take the receipts and, in a notebook, write in a 5-column list, which for her was of 1st importance: “Date,” “Item,” “Normal Price,” “Reduced Price,” “Saved.” The “Date” column had no verbal abbreviations such as “Sept.” It amounted only to numbers like “09.”

In additional transactions, Rosalind did equally: she based every problem she could on numbers.

A man across the street from where Rosalind lived had resided there since 1999. Like her, he had lost a spouse. He had the singular name, “Algernon.” They had met when Rosalind and her erstwhile husband moved in. The man told her that he preferred the designation, “Al.”

“Down from 3 syllables,” said Rosalind. “’Al-ger-non,’ to 2, ‘Al-gy,’ now 1, ‘Al.’”

The man looked at her. Was she joking? Negative. “Correct,” he said.

That was 3 years, 2 months and 23 days ago, now here they were at 11 o’clock on 29/01/2019 and Al was helping her 1 more time.

“Ceiling light inoperative,” she said. “Can’t solve it. Can’t change even 1 odd light bulb. Can’t do a fraction of what I should.”

“I’ll check it out,” said Al.

At 12 noon, that day, Al purchased 3 bulbs, returned, inserted 1, left 2 in the packet, which he deposited into 1 of Rosalind’s closets.

In a 2nd list, Rosalind had inscribed occasions on which Al had acted on her behalf, since her bereavement. They had increased exponentially because, except for arithmetic, her practical skills were approximately zero: 0. 

The night after the incident of the light bulb, the ambient temperature reduced to minus 18 degrees Celsius, and Rosalind’s garbage container which, every 3rd day of the week, had to be deposited near the road, was frozen to the slab on which it stood. So Rosalind called Al on his private number, which won’t be displayed here because it’s private. 

Rosalind inspected her list of what Al had done. If he put out the garbage container then, in the last 10 weeks, the count of things he’d completed would reach the integer 10.

Oh, she thought. That’s my number; I’m positive.

Al released the container, removed it to the verge. Rosalind stood with her door ajar, in her dressing gown. 

Then she said: “Can you come up here for 1 moment?”

What can I bestow? she thought. Show how infinitely grateful I am.

Al ascended Rosalind’s 3 front steps.

“Thank you,” she said. “So very much, 10 times more than I could ever say.”

She inclined towards him and kissed him, not on the cheek, not on the mouth, but on that little bit between the mouth and cheek, 1 time, 2 times. No, she thought, that’s not the equation. She vouchsafed a 3rd kiss.

Research Bulletin: Stories and Race Perception

The notable rise of multiracialism in Western countries has made it crucial for society to develop tools that facilitate the understanding of individuals who are different from us. One such tool is narrative fiction, which can induce story-consistent behaviour and reduce out-group mentality by challenging our underlying beliefs and assumptions. Johnson, Huffman and Jasper (2014) examined this possibility by conducting a study that examined whether reading narrative fiction could affect racial boundary perceptions (i.e., the boundary at which a mixed-race face is perceived as belonging to one race or another).

In their first experiment, individuals were randomly assigned to either the narrative condition or the synopsis condition. In the narrative condition, the participants read an excerpt of Saffron Dreams by Shaila Abdullah, which is about a courageous Muslim woman who stands up to a series of religious attacks and racial slurs. In the synopsis condition, participants read a summary of the same excerpt that was devoid of its original narrative qualities. After exposure to either of the two conditions, all participants viewed mixed-race Arab-Caucasian faces and were asked to categorize them as mixed-race, Arab, or Causcasian. Their second experiment was very similar, but with an additional control condition in which people read a brief history of the automobile. Also different in this second study, was that all of the faces were expressing low to moderate levels of anger.

In support of their hypotheses, for the first experiment individuals in the full narrative condition saw the two races as more similar and were more likely to perceive the faces as being mixed-race as opposed to strictly Arab or Caucasian.  In the second experiment, participants in the full narrative condition were less likely to disproportionately categorize moderately angry faces as Arab. Based on these results, it seems that stories about race might have a positive effect on racial perception.

References

Johnson, D. R., Huffman, B., & Jasper, D. (2014). Changing race boundary perception by reading narrative fiction. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 36, 83-90.

Post by Alma Rahimi

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

Effects of leisure reading

What psychological effects are there of reading short stories and novels? By now there has been a substantial amount of research to answer this question. The consensus seems to be that reading fiction as an individual pursuit can enable people to improve their empathy and to understand others better. The method known as meta-analysis involves collecting a number of studies on an issue such as this, and statistically estimating the size of effects. In this way "seems to be" can become "is." In a study published earlier this year, Micah Mumper and Richard Gerrig conducted a meta-analysis of studies of associations of lifetime leisure reading with social cognitive measures. The main measure of lifetime reading was the modification made by Mar et al. (2006) of the Author Recognition Test, to distinguish reading of fiction from non-fiction.

Analyses were performed for effects on empathy with data from 22 studies. The most frequently used outcome measure was the Interpersonal Reactivity Index of Davis (1983). Analyses were also performed on data from ten studies for effects on theory-of-mind (understanding others). For these, the most frequently used outcome measure was the Mind-in-the-Eyes test of Baron-Cohen et al. (2001).

To estimate the size of this effect, the Mumper and Gerrig aggregated results for empathy and theory of mind. The result was that an association was found for reading of fiction with empathy and theory of mind, which was small but significant. Reading non-fiction did not have this effect. At least one other meta-analysis, as yet unpublished, has been performed on experiments in which people were given different kinds of material to read, and short-term and medium term effects were measured. It comes to a similar conclusion.

Mumper and Gerrig say that although the effect is small it is important because of "the potential interpersonal and societal benefits of greater empathy and theory of mind" (p. 118).

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's syndrome or high-functioning autism. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 42, 241-251.

Davis, M. H. (1983). Measuring individual differences in empathy: Evidence for a multidimensional approach. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 44, 113-126.

Mumper, M. J., & Gerrig, R. J. (2017). Leisure reading and social cognition: A meta-analysis. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 11, 109-120.

Mar, R. A., Oatley, K., Hirsh, J., dela Paz, J., & Peterson, J. B. (2006). Bookworms versus nerds: Exposure to fiction versus non-fiction, divergent associations with social ability, and the simulation of fictional social worlds. Journal of Research in Personality, 40, 694-712.

Literariness and Empathy

Virginia Woolf said that Katherine Mansfield was the only person of whose writing she had ever felt jealous. Some of Mansfield's stories are, indeed, strikingly original. A new study by Anežka Kuzmičová and colleagues is an investigation of the reading one of these stories: "The fly," published in 1922, a year before Mansfield died.

The story is about "the boss," an elderly man who is reminded of the death of his only son, six years previously, in World War I. His son had been everything to him. In the period after his son's death, the boss had wept many times. Following the reminder, he made a demand to his office assistant that he should not be disturbed. He did this because he wanted to weep again, but no tears came. Mansfield writes: "He wasn't feeling as he wanted to feel." He noticed a fly in his inkwell, fished it out with a pen, put in on his blotting pad, and watched it go through elaborate motions to clean itself. When it had done so, the boss filled his pen, and from it let fall a drop of ink onto the fly.  Then, writes Mansfield, "... as if painfully, it dragged itself forward." More slowly this time, it started to clean itself again, and finally finished the task. Then the boss dripped more ink on the fly, then did so once more. The fly was dead. The boss flung the blotting paper with the sodden fly on it into the waste-paper basket, and could no longer remember what he had been thinking about before.

"The fly" is a story with lots of imagery and foregrounding, characteristics of literary writing. Influenced by the finding of David Kidd and Emanuele Castano (2013), that reading a literary short story as compared with a popular one, improved readers' empathy and theory-of-mind, Kuzmičová and colleagues asked people to read either a direct translation of "The fly," into Norwegian, or a translation that had been rewritten by a writer of popular fiction to remove foregrounded phrases. The method used by the researchers was to ask participants to read either the literary translation or the more popularly written version, and to mark passages that they found striking and evocative. They were then asked to choose three of these passages and write of their experiences in reading them. People's writings of their experiences were then coded for expressions of empathy.

The researchers expected, with this method, to replicate the result of Kidd and Castano. Instead they found that empathetic expressions were more numerous among readers of the more popularly written story than among readers of the more literary version. No allowance was made for differences of reading difficulty between the two versions, and there is no mention of the coding being done by people who were blind to which condition the participants' experiences were from. Nevertheless the result is thought provoking, and goes against a current trend. What might it mean?

Since our research group published the finding that the more fiction people read, the better they did in a test of empathy and theory-of-mind (Mar et al., 2006), empathy has become a topic of interest in understanding effects of fiction. Kidd and Castano (2013) hypothesized that the effect is principally due not just to fiction as compared with non-fiction, but that it occurs especially with literary works. So a kind of generalization has occurred: that the main effect of literary reading is to increase people's empathy.

Increased empathy may indeed occur with literary writing. Indeed this effect has been found by Emy Koopman (2016) for a literary text that included foregrounding as compared with a version from which foregrounding had been removed.

When I read Mansfield's stories, I find myself going back to read passages again, in order to think about them. This happened when I re-read "The fly." It could be that, in the study by Kuzmičová and colleagues, the popular version of "The fly" was more straightforward, more engaging for its readers, than the literary version.

Prompting empathy is not the only effect of literary writing, and foregrounding is not the only feature that makes for literariness. "The fly" seems to me to be less about empathy than about the passage of time, about regression to childhood, about the unconscious, about the human propensity, in war and in grief, to be cruel.

Kidd, D. C., & Castano, E. (2013). Reading literary fiction improves theory of mind. Science, 342, 377-380.

Koopman, E. M. E. (2016). Effects of "literariness" on emotions and on empathy and reflection after reading. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 10, 82-98.

Kuzmičová, A., Mangen, A., Støle, H., & Begnum, A. C. (2017). Literature and readers’ empathy: A qualitative text manipulation study. Language and Literature, 26, 137-152.

Mansfield, K. (1922). "The fly." In D. M. Davin (Ed.), Katherine Mansfield: Selected stories (pp. 353-358). Oxford: Oxford University Press (current edition 1981).

Mar, R. A., Oatley, K., Hirsh, J., dela Paz, J., & Peterson, J. B. (2006). Bookworms versus nerds: Exposure to fiction versus non-fiction, divergent associations with social ability, and the simulation of fictional social worlds. Journal of Research in Personality, 40, 694-712.

Research Bulletin: Spoiler Alert! Not all Spoilers Reduce Enjoyment of Short Stories

Leavitt and Christenfeld (2011) led a study that analyzed whether spoiling the ending of a story would increase or decrease its enjoyment. Surprisingly, readers enjoyed short stories more when they were spoiled (i.e., given a preview of the story that gave away the ending). Recently, William H. Levine (University of Arkansas), Michelle Betzner (University of Arkansas), and Kevin S. Autry (Grand Valley State University) attempted to replicate this previous study in order to see if the results were reliable. 

A total of 215 psychology students participated in their study. Participants were randomly assigned to read 1 of 3 possible short stories: (1) stories without a spoiler, (2) stories with a preceding spoiler, (3) and stories that included a spoiler of the ending mid-way through the story. Participants then reported how much they enjoyed the story. The researchers found that spoilers presented before the stories reduced enjoyment of these stories, relative to unspoiled stories. This was the exact opposite of what the past study found. Spoilers presented mid-way through a story had no effect on enjoyment. 

Although this study failed to replicate the past study, it also differed in some ways from this past work. More specifically, the current researchers used different stories, different spoilers, and the study was completed on a computer instead of on paper.

In conclusion, different studies using different methods have produced conflicting findings. Some studies find that spoiling a story can increase the reader’s enjoyment while other studies have found the exact opposite. Until further research is done, we cannot conclude that spoilers increase or decrease enjoyment. 

Posted by Elina Gama Fila

References

Leavitt, J. D., & Christenfeld, N. S. (2011). Story spoilers don’t spoil stories. Psychological Science, 22, 1152–1154.

Levine, W. H., Betzner, M., & Autry, K. S. (2016). The effect of spoilers on the enjoyment of
short stories. Discourse Processes, 53, 513–531.

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

Alternative Worlds

Haruki Murakami is acclaimed as one the most interesting present-day writers of short stories and novels. He is Japanese, but influenced by Western writers such as Flaubert and Kafka.

"The elephant vanishes," title story of a collection of short stories, is set in a small town in a suburb of Tokyo. The town used to have a zoo, but it closed. Only an elderly elephant remains, living in its own elephant house and looked after by its 63-year-old keeper, Noboru Watanabe. The outside part of the elephant house is solidly built cage, surrounded by a strong fence, ten feet high made of iron bars anchored in concrete. In addition the elephant has a steel cuff, a shackle, round its right hind leg, attached to a 30-foot-long chain. Between the evening of 17th May and the next day, the elephant is found to have vanished, along with its keeper.

Murakami is good at depicting the everyday world, and he is engaging to read. This story includes the political controversy in the town about whether to keep the elephant when the zoo closed and, when it vanishes, he depicts newspaper stories of a recognizable kind about the disappearance. The narrator is interested in the elephant and keeps a scrap-book of the published newspaper articles.

As readers we are on the edge of the ordinary: a small suburban community with a lone African elephant. But why the iron-bar fence and the steel shackle? We barely notice when the almost ordinary becomes strange, the barely plausible becomes impossible. The elephant did not escape. It is no-where to be found, despite extensive searches. And no large elephant footprints are seen on the muddy grounds around the elephant house. The steel shackle that used to be round the elephant's leg is still intact. It is still locked, and there are only two keys, both still in place, one locked up in the police station and one locked up at the fire station.

Then the narrator meets a young woman, as part of his work life. The two get on well together. They like each other. and something seems to be developing between them. They go out for a meal. The narrator cannot help talking to the woman about his preoccupation: the vanished elephant. The evening before it disappeared, after opening hours, he tells her, he was on a cliff overlooking the elephant house, observing the affection between the elephant and its keeper, which was not expressed during the day when the public would visit, and he noticed that the size difference between them started to get less. The elephant seemed to be shrinking.

Did the elephant get so small that it could slip out of its cuff and squeeze through the bars of its cage, and the bars of the fence, and go off with its keeper, of whom it seemed so fond?

The young woman avoids seeing the protagonist again. 

As it seems to me, Murakami is doing what the surrealists were trying to do, in depicting how the unconscious seeps into consciousness, and sometimes even pervades day-to-day life, though he does it better. His ordinary world and the alternative world interpenetrate in ways that enable each to throw light on the other, and enable us to think about our minds and ourselves in new ways. And, far more interesting than the surrealists' mere depictions, with Murakami there is always the relational. How does our individuality, with its peculiarities and unconscious aspects, affect our lives with others, and how do our relationships affect our sense of self?

Murakami, H. (1994). The elephant vanishes: Stories (A. Birnbaum & J. Rubin, Trans.). New York: Vintage.

Are shrubs the hipster scented candle? Shrubs and Fermentation, part 2 of 2

As I should perhaps have explained in my prior essay struggling through the social justice implications of sugars and flavorings, shrubs are intense extractions of aromatic compounds from plant matter, contributing a much wider and more idiosyncratic flavoring of beverages. They are often extracted by the combination of fruits, herbs, and spices with sugar and cider vinegar, the active bacterial cultures of which continue to ferment the sugars and fruits, creating novel but recognizable flavors—often from produce that might otherwise have spoiled, such as softening fruits.

Given contemporary interest in mixology, shrubs represent a rediscovery of longstanding folk foodways, such as making switchel (highlighted in the haying scene featured in my childhood copy of the Little House on the Prairie cookbook, for example). They are often also used to perform claims about the tastes of place, taking advantage of locally characteristic flavors and preserving them in relatively storable — and marketable — ways.

Shrubs are also an excellent example of what are often characterized as hipster approaches to consumption and production, emphasizing artisanal craft and unique and intense experience, particularly in the mundane materiality of everyday life. As part of a recent project exploring the uses of edible signal species of climate change, I have been learning about shrubs, and experiencing their intensity has led me to pose this question about whether they represent something like a hipster version of scented candles, a question I think is interesting beyond the superficial similarity of enjoyable aroma.

As a person who has always avoided artificial scents because of unpleasant effects such as headache and respiratory tract pain, I have often been dubious about the appeal of cinnamon-scented stores, smelly candles and fruity personal care items, and air fresheners in general. (And research on the effects of phthalates and other substances used in these scented products reinforces my concern and suggests that people with heightened chemical sensitivities to such substances may well be providing coal-mine canary services to the broader populace.) However, the half hour I spent sniffing at my first shrub once it had brewed (when I had rescued impulse-buy strawberries and some leftover parsley) gave me a sudden appreciation for the sensory pleasure that scented candles must provide for others less punished by them!

Recognizing the joy and beauty of this sensory enjoyment — whether it's a more protected and less acute one, or a more sensation seeking version — makes me also recognize some of the social dynamics caught up in the celebration of the invitation to inhabit a particular place through the senses, or the deriding of poor taste around someone else's scent preferences. As with the precious approach to many food and "lifestyle" choice, things like scent can be used not only for enjoyment, but to perform that enjoyment in ways that signal class positioning as well as empathy for other (as with sugar boycotts). Implications for the ways we craft narratives of of the senses may include more attention to the way we invite others to share or explore our experiences of sensory delight, without dismissiveness or judgment and with attention to the embedding of privilege in foodie preciousness. (A wonderful film treatment of taste this evokes is The Taste of Others!)

Research Bulletin: Social effects of reading

Jessica Black and Jennifer Barnes of the University of Oklahoma have reported an interesting experiment in which they replicated the study by David Kidd and Emanuele Castano (2013) to find that reading fiction improves empathy and theory-of-mind. As well as this replication, Black and Barnes also tested whether reading fiction, or non-fiction, was able to improve cognition more generally. To do this, as well as the outcome measure of empathy and theory-of-mind, Baron-Cohen et al’s (2001) Mind in the Eyes test, they also applied another outcome measure, of understanding intuitive physics. 

Black and Barnes had 91 participants in their experiment. Each one read two literary stories and two non-fictional essays, in two sessions. In the first session they were randomly assigned to read either a fictional short story or a non-fiction essay. After reading, they were randomly assigned to complete either the Mind in the Eyes test or intuitive physics test. They then did some other tests. and then read another text: a second short story if they had previously read a short story or a second essay if they had previously read an essay, and were given an outcome test of the kind they had not taken after reading their first text. After a break, the participants had a second session of reading and outcome testing. Those who had previously read fiction read non-fiction essays, and vice versa. 

The main results were that reading fiction, but not non-fiction, improved people’s empathy and theory-of-mind in terms of their scores on the Mind in the Eyes test, but neither fiction nor non-fiction helped improve people’s understanding of intuitive physics. In the series of studies begun by Mar et al. (2006), in which an association was found of reading fiction with empathy and theory-of-mind, the assumption was that because fiction is largely about selves in the social world, then the main outcome would be in the social domain. But perhaps the effect was not just for reasoning in the social domain; what about reasoning more generally? Black’s and Barnes’s results correspond with those of a study by Raymond Mar, reported in his PhD thesis (2007), that neither fiction nor non-fiction reading had any effect on analytical reasoning as measured by a test taken by intending law students.

Reading fiction has now been shown to have replicable effects on empathy and theory-of-mind. The question of whether it has non-social effects has now been tested for analytical reasoning and intuitive physics. But might there be other effects?

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's syndrome or high-functioning autism. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 42, 241-251. 

Black, J. E., & Barnes, J. L. (2015). The effects of reading material on social and non-social cognition. Poetics, 52, 32-43.

Kidd, D. C., & Castano, E. (2013). Reading literary fiction improves theory of mind. Science, 342, 377-380.

Mar, R.A. (2007). Simulation-based theories of narrative comprehension: Evidence and implications. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Toronto.

Mar, R. A., Oatley, K., Hirsh, J., dela Paz, J., & Peterson, J. B. (2006). Bookworms versus nerds: Exposure to fiction versus non-fiction, divergent associations with social ability, and the simulation of fictional social worlds. Journal of Research in Personality, 40, 694-712. 

Image: Shakespeare and Company Bookshop in Paris

Quick Hit: The Saddest, Littlest, Bookworm

You may have already seen this video of a child terribly upset whenever a book ends, but if you haven't it's worth a minute of your time. I'm sure many of us can sympathize with this feeling!

Research Bulletin: Do spoilers spoil stories for everyone?

Many of us go out of our way to avoid information about a new movie or book because we believe that it will spoil our enjoyment of the story. But does knowing plot events and outcomes actually make a narrative less enjoyable? Evidence from research is mixed, with some studies showing that people enjoy stories more when the outcome is known and other research suggesting that the opposite is true.

One possible reason for these contradictory findings is that knowing the outcome of a story may only spoil it for certain people but not others. A recent study by Judith Rosenbaum (Albany State University) and Benjamin Johnson (VU University Amsterdam) tested this possibility by looking at two personality traits: (1) Need for Affect (the tendency to seek out and enjoy emotional situations) and (2) Need for Cognition (the tendency to engage in and enjoy thinking).

The researchers first asked undergraduate students to read a story preview for one of three different short stories. For half of the participants, the preview contained spoilers and for the rest it did not. The participants then read the full story and answered questionnaires measuring how much they enjoyed the story, as well as personality traits including Need for Cognition and Need for Affect. Interestingly, participants who had a high Need for Affect enjoyed unspoiled stories more than spoiled stories. On the other hand, participants who had a high Need for Cognition were no more or less likely to enjoy a spoiled story over an unspoiled story. 

The researchers hypothesize that not knowing how a story turns out can increase suspense and arousal, leading to greater enjoyment. Unspoiled stories may therefore be especially enjoyable for people with a high Need for Affect, who have a greater desire for emotional stimulation. This emotional suspense and arousal, however, is unrelated to one’s tendency to seek out and enjoy complex thought, which may explain why story enjoyment among those high in Need for Cognition was not affected by spoilers.

This study offers an interesting insight into how personality traits play a role in the relationship between spoilers and enjoyment. It also highlights the importance of measuring personality traits in psychological research. It appears that whether or not spoilers spoil a story depends on who you are!

Rosenbaum, J. E., & Johnson, B. K. (2015, March 9). Who’s Afraid of Spoilers? Need for Cognition, Need for Affect, and Narrative Selection and Enjoyment. Psychology of Popular Media Culture. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/ppm0000076

Post by Marina Rain.

Research Bulletin: Some relation to her

One of Anton Chekhov's favourite stories was the very short piece he called “The student.” The story is simple. It’s about how, on a cold night, round a fire, a theological student tells a story to an old woman, Vasilisa, and her daughter, who are both widows. He then notices that Vasilisa is in tears. The student thinks that there was something in the story which “had some relation to her.” 

Was Chekhov personally fond of his short story, “The student,” because he thought the experience of Vasilisa is central to literature?

Ed Vessel, Gabrielle Starr, and Nava Rubin (2013) had people in an fMRI scanner look at images of art works that were unfamiliar to them. The researchers monitored activation of the medial prefrontal cortex, which is part of the default mode network, a system in the brain that is active when a person is at rest, rather than attending to events in the outside world. Activation of this network is associated, too, with inwardness, and also when a person does something, or thinks about something, that involves the self.  

The people in the fMRI machine were given the task of rating how they themselves were moved by each artwork they saw. Activation of the medial prefrontal cortex, in the default mode network, suggested that occasionally an artwork was so well-matched to the unique makeup of an individual that it obtained access to the neural processes of the default mode network: processes that are concerned with the self. Ordinarily, external objects do not gain access to this network. 

The researchers conclude that they were picking up signs of certain kind of experience that produced a sense of being “moved,” or being “touched from within.” 

There seems here a close parallel to what happened to Vasilisa in Chekhov’s story.

Chekhov, A. (1894). “The student” in Stories by Anton Chekhov (R. Pevear & L. Volokhonsky, Trans.) pp. 263-266.  New York: Bantam (2000)).

Vessel, E. A., Starr, G. G., & Rubin, N. (2013). Art reaches within: Aesthetic experience, the self and the default mode network. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 7, 258. doi: org/10.3389/fnins.2013.00258

Image: Anton Chekhov

Research Bulletin: Do Reviews Change Our Evaluation of What We Are About to Read or Have Already Read?

As active readers we are constantly evaluating what we are reading in order to form our own opinions. Making personal evaluations based on what we have read is a fundamental aspect of the reading experience. However, we may also look to the opinions of our peers and professional critics for guidance. Sometimes we seek out a review prior to reading a piece of literature in order to decide whether or not to read it. At other times we might read a review after we have read something to find out what others think about it. Do these reviews affect how we see a piece of literature? Moreover, does the source of the review or whether it is read before or after we read something influence our personal evaluation? Do negative reviews have a different effect than positive reviews? Peter Dixon (University of Alberta), Marisa Bortolussi (University of Alberta), and Paul Sopčak (MacEwan University) conducted a study to answer these questions. 

These researchers hypothesized that reading the review first would lead the reader to focus more on particular aspects of the text that were mentioned in the review. In contrast, reading the review after the piece would influence the reader’s evaluation to fall more in line with the views of the reviewer. In order to test their ideas, participants either read a review and then a piece of literature (N = 56), or read the literature first and then read the review (N = 48). In both conditions the participants had to read the first two pages from four novels, all of which were accompanied by either a positive expert review, a negative expert review, a positive peer review, or a negative peer review. It should be noted that the participants were not forced to read the reviews. After participants in both conditions read a booklet containing the pieces of literature and reviews, they evaluated the stories.

When the review was read after the piece, positive peer reviews had a larger impact than negative peer reviews, shifting opinions to be more positive. Both types of peer reviews were also more impactful than reviews from professional critics. When the review was read before the piece, only negative reviews by an expert had an effect on reader evaluations, shifting opinions to be more negative. These results are interesting because not only do they establish that reviews affect readers’ evaluations, but they also indicate that when a review is read affects how much a reader likes a text.

Dixon, P., Bortolussi, M., & Sopčák, P. (2015). Extratextual effects on the evaluation of narrative texts. Poetics, 48, 42–54. doi:10.1016/j.poetic.2014.12.00

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

Posted by Amin Khajehnassiri

Research Bulletin: How Other People Influence Our Experience of Reading

Reading a critic’s review of a movie or asking a friend their opinion before you read a book shapes your expectations more than you may think. A recent study by Dr. Randi Shedlosky-Shoemaker and colleagues (2011) investigated how a peer’s evaluation influenced readers’ enjoyment and engagement in a story, known as transportation.  Participants were required to read the short story Sunday in the Park by Bel Kaufman, with the influence of peer reviews examined in two different studies.

In the first experiment, 106 undergraduate students were randomly assigned to read reviews of the text that were either favourable or unfavourable, before they read the story themselves. After reading the story, the participants were asked to also write a review. Not surprisingly, those who read positive reviews expected the story to be better than those that read negative reviews. Participants who read positive reviews also wrote more positive comments compared to those who read negative comments. Since the nature of the review was randomly determined, it appears that reviews do influence our perception of a text.

In the second experiment, 163 participants were told by the experimenters that they were the last group in a three group experiment. They were asked to read the evaluations of the text by both the previous groups before reading the story themselves. Reading favourable evaluations made participants focus on the positive attributes of the story. In contrast, reading unfavourable evaluations made them criticize the same things that were criticized in the reviews they had read. When there were inconsistent evaluations (e.g., one negative and one positive) the reader paid closer attention to the story. This led to increased engagement with the story, presumably to try and resolve the inconsistency between the two evaluations.

This pair of studies shows how peer evaluations can influence how we see a story, shaping our own opinions and attention in complex ways. Not only are we swayed by positive and negative reviews, but contradictory reviews can also make us more attentive to a story and its various aspects. 

Shedlosky-Shoemaker, R., Costabile, K., DeLuca, H., & Arkin, R. (2011). The Social Experience of Entertainment Media: Effects of others’ evaluations on our experience. Journal of Media Psychology: Theories, Methods, and Applications, 23, 111-121.

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

Posted by Guneet Daid.

Research Bulletin: Gender and Reading

The issue of gender and reading continues to be of interest for OnFiction so that, for instance, a few weeks ago (click here) we commented on the study in which Marisa Bortolussi and colleagues (2010) found that both women and men preferred male protagonists. Is this result due to congruence with the stereotype in Western industrial society that men are the ones who do things out there in the world? Maybe it’s different in Russia where I have heard it said that the women do everything, and the men do everything else.

The gender differences of one of the first studies in our group in Toronto surprised us. The study was a central part of Angela Biason’s PhD thesis (1993), and it was reported in Oatley (1996). We asked 59 high-school students to read one of two short stories about adolescent identity. One was “Red Dress” by Alice Munro. It had a female protagonist. The other was “Sucker” by Carson McCullers. It had a male protagonist. We adapted the method of Larson and Seilman (1988) and asked the participants, as they read, to mark an M in the margin if they experienced a memory coming to mind, and to mark an E in the margin if they experienced an emotion. We counted up the Ms and Es for each story. The 12 girls who read “Red Dress” experienced a mean of 6.67 emotions as they were reading, and the 13 girls who read “Sucker” experienced 6.77 emotions (overall mean 6.72). By contrast, the 17 boys who read “Red Dress” experienced a mean of 2.88 emotions, and the 17 who read “Sucker” experienced 4.88 emotions (overall mean 3.88). (The overall means were significantly different as a function of gender at p < 0.02.)
We interpreted our results as meaning that high-school girls were much more involved than boys in these stories as they read them, and that the girls were equally able to experience emotions in themselves with both female and male protagonists. The high-school girls were willing to make a leap into another mind, they were equally able to identify with a female or male protagonist. By contrast, the boys were, overall, not only less willing to identify with the protagonist about whom they were reading, but they were particularly unwilling to make a leap into the mind of the female protagonist of “Red Dress.” We also asked both the girls and the boys to write a summary of the story, and we had these marked by their English teachers. There was no significant gender difference between the sets of marks, nor was there any significant difference between the expected marks of the girls and boys in English literature. The curriculum for the classes whose members we studied was typical for high school English literature: being able to give details of stories, and understand their themes. It puzzled us that these abilities were independent of girls' and boys' willingness to involve themselves in the stories they read.

What does this mean? One conclusion is that although high-school girls and boys were equally able to do as they were asked by their teachers of literature, the girls were more able to become involved with, and hence to take an interest in, stories in which the content was interpersonal, and had to do with understanding the self and others. As we reported in December 2013 (click here) the US National Endowment for the Arts found in their 2009 survey, based on 18,000 telephone interviews, that 58 % of women but only 42% of men had, in the previous year, read a novel a short story, a piece of poetry, or a play.

Biason, A. (1993). Emotional responses of high-school students to short stories. PhD, University of Toronto.  

Bortolussi, M., Dixon, P., & Sopčák, P. (2010). Gender and reading. Poetics, 38, 299-318.

Larsen, S. F., & Seilman, U. (1988). Personal remindings while reading literature. Text, 8, 411-429.

National Endowment for the Arts. (2009). Reading on the rise: A new chapter in American literacy (No. 46). Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Arts.

Oatley, K. (1996). Inference in narrative and science. In D. R. Olson & N. Torrance (Eds.), Modes of thought (pp. 123-140). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Image: Book cover of Alice Munro’s first collection of short stories, which includes “Red Dress.” 

Research Bulletin: Traumatic Brain Injury in Asterix and Obelix Comics

Here at OnFiction we are primarily concerned with employing the tools of psychological science to better understand the cognitive processes associated with narrative fiction. Fiction, however, can also be usefully employed to illustrate the principles of psychology. In a light-hearted article published in the journal Acta Neurochirurgica, Marcel Kamp (Heinrich-Heine-University) and his colleagues analyzed all of the instances of traumatic brain injury (TBI) that occurred within the popular Asterix comic books. For those unfamiliar with this series, it describes how a single tiny village in (formerly) Gaul successfully fends off the Roman occupation thanks to a magic potion that confers great strength to its warriors. Asterix, the Gaul warrior, and his friend Obelix (a menhir delivery man) have a great many adventures that inevitably involve Roman legionnaires (and others) getting thumped on the head an awful lot. The researchers read all of the Asterix comic books and noted evidence of TBI (e.g., raccoon eyes, A.K.A. periorbital ecchymoses), rated its severity, and noted the important contextual factors. Across all of the books there were a shocking number of instances of TBI, with over 700 suspected cases. Nearly all of the cases could be described as adult males receiving blunt-force trauma to the head within the context of an assault. Romans seem to have gotten the worst of it, accounting for 450 of the 704 cases, but the Gauls did not go unscathed, likely suffering a TBI in 120 cases. As far as perpetrators go, Asterix and Obelix were often involved (402 cases) although the other Gauls also got their lumps in (208 cases). Thankfully, all symptoms of TBI appeared to resolve within a few hours. One of the most important factors appears to be whether a helmet was worn by the victim or not. Although most victims wore a protective helmet, in the vast majority of cases this helmet was lost during the traumatic incident (88%), which resulted in a more severe TBI. This study holds important relevance for readers wishing to avoid TBI. Namely, leave the Gauls alone and keep your helmet chinstraps fastened.

Kamp, M. A., Slotty, P., Sarikaya-Seiwert, S., Steiger, H.-J., & Hänggi, D. (2011). Traumatic brain injuries in illustrated literature: experience from a series of over 700 head injuries in the Asterix comic books. Acta Neurochirurgica, 153, 1351–1355.

Research Bulletin: Child Morality Tales and Honest Behavior

A great deal of the interest in whether reading can boost empathic abilities lies in the possibility that greater empathy toward others will result in more prosocial behaviour. Reading may influence behaviour in more direct ways, however, through the explicit depiction of prosocial themes for example. This might be especially true for children’s literature, which often includes the goal of moral education. Dr. Kang Lee (University of Toronto) and his collaborators recently examined whether exposure to a storybook could reduce lying behaviour in children aged 3 to 7 years of age. In their study, a researcher presented a desirable toy then told the child to turn around and not peek at it while she left the room to get a storybook. Hidden cameras recorded whether the child was able to resist temptation and avoid peeking at the toy. When the researcher returned, she read the child one of 4 possible stories: (1) The Tortoise and the Hare [The control story], (2) Pinocchio, (3) The Boy Who Cried Wolf, or (4) George Washington and the Cherry Tree. The latter 3 stories all deal with themes related to lying. After reading the story, the child was asked whether she or he had peeked at the toy while the researcher was out of the room. Based on the hidden camera footage, Dr. Lee and his colleagues knew which children had peeked, and of these children some admitted to peaking while others chose to lie. The researchers were therefore able to assess whether the children who were read a story related to lying were less likely to lie compared to those who were read the control story. Surprisingly, only children who were read the story about George Washington were less likely to lie. Children in this condition were over 3 times less like to lie compared to those who were read the control story (The Tortoise and the Hare). Dr. Lee suspected that the reason why George Washington was effective whereas the other two stories about lying were not might have been because it is made clear in the former case that the character benefits from his honesty. A follow-up study presented a different version of the George Washington story in which the main character is punished for lying and in this case children lied at about the same rates as in the control condition. From these studies it appears that children’s stories can affect moral behaviour, at least in the short-term directly after being exposed to a story and when the story highlights the positive consequences of good behaviour. 

Lee, K., Talwar, V., McCarthy, A., Ross, I., Evans, A., & Arruda, C. (in press). Can classic moral stories promote honesty in children? Psychological Science.