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.

Taking Up Space: Embodying Formations of Visionary Fiction

As I have noted in the past, I study with an organization that provides yoga training in the context of disability, and every year, they hold a month-long "Kiss My Asana" yogathon, which I take as an opportunity to explore embodied experience more deeply, particularly how every body can access the most experience. Following the lead of Matt Sanford, who runs MindBody Solutions, I'm organizing my yogathon practice around creating context where it is possible to try to take up as much space as possible -- a feeling I think can be easiest to access through poses that encourage you to push out like a star. 

Last weekend's amazing Formation video repeatedly featured this star-spaced theme -- combining the physical act of making space with attention to the social relationships that challenge or support this space making, something I'd like to stay a few more things about, given that moving the yogathon to February from its prior location in April has placed it squarely in Black History Month.

This child takes this space in front of a line of riot police, which gives a sense of how this act of reaching out can take different kinds of effort, since the star-reaching, dry-swimming, afro-maintaining dance formation in the pool is obviously not easy.

Beyoncé is obviously very powerful -- and part of what has made Formation rock the internet is not just the power of star poses, but their particular use: pitting that power in both powerful and vulnerable ways against oppression:

Splayed out on a police car as it submerges in a New Orleans flood, after asking "Stop shooting us," or restaging plantation representations, she enacts what Adrienne Maree Brown describes as important visionary fiction, showing possibility and what the space it inhabits looks like:

Mental Models

The ability to make mental models of other people is one of the most important for us as humans. Without such models we would be unable understand others, and be unable to cooperate with them. Nor would we know very well what to do when we were in conflict with them. Reading fiction, with its focus on people, their intentions, their actions, and the vicissitudes such actions encounter is, as we have often discussed in OnFiction, a good way of augmenting our ability to construct such models. In a recent paper, Demis Hassabis, Nathan Spreng, Andrei Rusu, Clifford Robbins, Raymond Mar, and Daniel Schachter (2014) have tracked down where, in the brain, such models are constructed.

In this study participants were first asked to imagine four people for whom they were given photographs and names. They were then asked to imagine (make mental models of) these people from 12 statements chosen to indicate whether each one was either high or low on the Big Five personality dimension of extraversion, and high or low on the Big Five dimension of agreeableness. An example statement for someone high on extraversion was: “Is outgoing, sociable;” for someone low on extraversion: “Is sometimes shy, inhibited.” A person high on agreeableness was described with statements like: “Likes to cooperate with others.” A person low in agreeableness was described with such statements as “Can be cold and aloof.” Then participants were asked to predict how each of the people they had imagined might behave when faced when faced with a certain vicissitude in a certain kind of place (for instance, a bar, a restaurant, a bank): for instance “In a bar—someone spills their drink—Dave.” Participants rated the vividness with which they were able to imagine the scene, and their confidence in portraying the individual accurately.

As the participants imagined the scenes, their brains were monitored using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), and analyses were performed. It was found that specific activations of the medial pre-frontal cortex were associated with imagining the people as they encountered events in different situations. The researchers say: “Our results also identified specific brain regions where personality models are coded, as well as where individual trait information is represented in the brain” (p. 1985). In the last paragraph of their paper they say: “It has been suggested that mental simulations bestow an adaptive advantage on humans by allowing them to prepare for upcoming situations… Planning for social situations by imagining the likely behavior of others may be especially critical for the success of a highly social species, such as humans“ (p. 1985).

Hassabis, D., Spreng, R. N., Rusu, A. A., Robbins, C. A., Mar, R. A., & Schachter, D. L. (2014). Imagine all the people: How the brain creates and uses personality models to predict behavior. Cerebral Cortex, 24, 1979-1987.  

Image: Person in an MRI machine.

Reflexive Dialogics

In recent posts, I have been thinking through some questions of internal dialogue. Noticing the process of narrating new places as I explore them has heightened my awareness of a relatively constant layer of internal dialogue, and I have become interested in the functions of this dialogic layer of thought.

One of my projects in my temporary home has been to make itako boards for planing in the surf here, as the shape of the waves is different from the water where I have swum before, and I have been exploring how to move in unfamiliar water. This has provided two domains for continuing my observation of internal dialogue.

First, surfing language is so amusingly already incorporated into everyday vernacular that there is a hiccoughing cadence to the process of realizing what words like “wipeout,” “bail,” and “rip” mean in embodied, rather than metaphorical, experience. I often find myself using the surfing terms I have picked up from pop culture in the imperative, directed at myself: “duck dive!”

I then often have an agonizing (and very motivated) moment with a wave looming up over me as I summon all of the embodied associations I have with this word to launch myself into (under) the wave (usually a second too late, after such a thought process, and often with the accompanying doubt, “or should that have been a turtle roll?). As the physical experience becomes more familiar and automatic, the verbal exploratory layer gets less noticeable. It is when I am flailing in the fizz that I thrash the potential accumulated glossary for insight; when I am shooting along in a wave, it seems less likely to be narrated. (It will be interesting to see if this is a parabolic association: perhaps once there is more bandwidth to spare, exploratory language will be more noticeable? Are there proportions of expertise to novelty that maximize or minimize internal narration?)

Second, the laborious process of making boards that were seaworthy provided a chance to observe the kind of dialogue that appears when doing repetitive things like sanding or painting. Almost every time I dug into the process of sanding to reach the state of even attention over the surface that contributes to a proper finish, I would find that quality of attention accompanied by the playing out of elaborate dialogues of fictional characters in my head. It reminded me of summers painting houses with my father—a very distinctive kind of imaginative dialogue, where I often came to notice that I was spinning out a story right in the middle of a complex plot.  

Together with my recent attention to the constant labeling efforts of internal narration, this familiar process made me think about how the dialogue that plays through our heads as we make sense of the things we are doing (or as we reach a certain daydreaming quality of attention) seems useful to understand. It tells about the complex networks of meaning and bias we bring to new situations, and reveals some of the ways that we bring our already existing interpretive schemes even when we think we are experiencing something novel and fresh.

It also may suggest interesting things about the way we model dialogue.

Michael Cunningham’s The Hours passingly portrays Virginia Woolf’s relationship with this almost subterranean creative process. In the film version, Woolf is seen in a series of scenes in a very specific state of distracted attention, in which she discovers, in quite fully formed shape, large sections of dialogue and plot. Looking back over our archives to see how dialogic thought has been treated, I found it productive along this line of thought to revisit Thomas Scheff’s 2009 essay on “Virginia Woolf’s Multi-personal Dialogues”:

If women are usually better than men at spontaneous, non-instrumental, rapid role-taking, with looseness of association, this difference might explain women’s greater intuition then men. It may be that rapid, loose and/or non-conventional associations are a feature of parallel, rather than serial processing in mental activity. Parallel mental processing means that one is thinking in several different trains of thought at once. These parallel trains of thought are all, or all but one, going on outside awareness. When these several trains are all attempts to solve the same problem, they can give rise to extremely rapid and imaginative solutions to difficult problems.

 

Re-labeling a fierce wind: Listening more to internal dialogue

I commuted this morning for the first time to my new office against a head wind that was strong enough to beg for an additional adjective. The wind was whipping off the hills to the north and pouring into the valley with such strength that it stopped my bike on downhill slopes, and it took herculean pedaling to get to work in just under twice the amount of time I had estimated it would take. My route takes me around the bay end of Otago harbor, and especially as I got down to the south side of the water, the wind was not only trying to push me off my bicycle, it was also throwing fistfuls of water my way, and snapping branches down into my path. Passing through the lee of my favorite pohutukawa trees almost knocked me off my bike in the other direction, the contrast was so sharp when sheltered.

In this kind of retrospect, it is easier to deconstruct the various parts of my experience of the wind, and analyze their relationship to my emotional state in relation to it. At the time, however, my main reaction was terse. I kept finding myself exclaiming (to myself) about what a fierce wind this was, or how wicked.

This was clearly a practiced response—the kind of thing one might say to a companion facing into a stiff wind, perhaps to keep spirits up, or to check in to see whether a course correction might be in order, or if the goal is worth the punishment of the wind. It certainly summons a certain attention to the wind: is this the kind of wind that is bringing a change in the weather I need to pay attention to?

My immediate response was surprisingly normative: I found myself chastising my inner wind labeller. True, the wind is from the north northwest, and my northern hemisphere self braces against the Alberta Clipper-eque cold that often signals at the time of year. But here in Dunedin in summer, what if this is a warm equatorial burst? Pedal harder. And I would no sooner concentrate on pedaling again when I would hear the first voice start up again about what a fierce wind that was.

In the weeks that have followed since I wrote the first lines above on my first commute, this conversation with myself has stuck with me, and has made me notice some things about internal dialogue. First was its pre-formedness. I was not so much searching for descriptions for what I was experiencing as I was discovering what I was experiencing by the way my internal voice was narrating it to me. This was accentuated by the dramatic nature of the effortful windy bike ride, and my consequently narrowed mental bandwidth. When I wondered, somewhat involuntarily, “why is this so hard?” a preformed answer was already there with an explanation about the ferocity of the wind.

This was, secondly, not just a descriptive note, but a preformed normative analysis that constructed the wind as a character! By assigning qualities like fierce and wicked to the wind, my internal weather monitor was personifying what I was “up against,” and providing me a set of similarly preformed schemata for responding: fight, struggle, perhaps retreat. It was only through the second part of the internal dialogue that I could access a perhaps more interesting schema like explore—or even reconsider those hasty judgments that come from experience in a very different place.

Although fairly mundane, these observations about the qualities of internal dialogue made me start to pay considerably new attention to how much I was relying on presets to interpret and orient in new situations. And especially since I was already bringing the frame of reorienting myphenological expectations in a hemispherically reversed seasonal transition, I had yet a new tool for noticing when and how that second part of the conversation could be encouraged, figuring out what patterns I am observing, and how those work.

Wrestling Seasons

As we pass the equinox, days and nights are the same length and summer and winter pass each other across the hemispheres. This makes me sit up and take notice of time, and it makes me think about what, specifically, I should be noticing before I will miss having noticed it.

In the wake of my recent reflection on phenology, the observation of the change in plants and animals over seasons—and on my attempt to stockpile sustaining phenological moments to help layer in comforting seasonal emotions to offset less comfortable ones—I have been reconstructing for myself one of the favorite stories of my childhood about the struggle between summer and winter. 

I do not properly know the origins of this story. My father told it to me, and I remember him calling it a story of the people who live in the middle of North America. The story recounts a long struggle (I remember it as a leg wrestling struggle) between the personifications of the spirits of the warm season and the spirit of the cold season. As I recall, there is a lot at stake for the people in the place where they are fighting—their crops and their comfort—but I also remember the story of the long struggle being both epic but also well supported: not carnage, but steady and well matched engagement. And the engagement goes on so long that it is decided that one of them does not win, but rather that half will govern one part of the year, and this is one of the origin stories of the seasons.

As I think about the relationship between the seasons—and as the popular media grapples with the instability of the polar vortex, and what it might mean to adapt our culture to seasons that do not act as our stories have prepared us to expect—I keep imagining summer and winter wrapping their legs and holding shoulders. I imagine the conversations they have. Weather conversations are such a trope of doldrums, but my meteorologist office neighbor has revised my understanding of that, and their conversations that play out in my mind are compelling and perhaps revealing.

Imagining them, I want to know more about what this story told people, and to honor what it made them explore--but I am also happy I have explored my imagination of it in the weeks since my last post on seasons. It has reminded me how much of the function of stories is not just to tell us something, but to get us to notice what it might be like.

 

Every body's Embodied Experience

You cannot make or have experience for somebody else. You can, however, pay good attention to somebody else's experience, or interpret or discover the meaning of experience together, and in the process you might learn more about your own experience and what it means to be in a body. As narrators sharing words about the psychology of fiction and narrative in virtual space, it is easy to interact without paying adequate attention to embodied experience--and as such disembodied habit becomes reinforced, sharing the experience of ourselves in bodies can be challenging. As we interact with each others' narrative personae in this disembodied space, it also becomes easier to generalize from our own experiences--and to unintentionally discount others' experiences by assuming they should follow the patterns of our own. Because food is what I am often writing about, I get to cheat in some ways: writing about eating invokes bodily experience. But especially because food is the focus of my work, I sometimes want non-food methods for getting people to pay attention to their inward experience and to think and feel from inside their bodies. Toward this end, I have spent a significant part of the past year studying the teaching of yoga, and particularly teaching yoga in a way that makes it accessible to everyone. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the intensive workshop I have just completed has confirmed my suspicions about the radical potential of increasing access to embodied experience.

Something Missing

Narrative is important in giving meaning to life. In some narratives the meanings seem complete, but in others something seems to be missing. It may have been this sense of something missing that, in medieval times, sent people off on pilgrimages to Jerusalem or Canterbury, and still today sends people off on literary pilgrimages of a kind I have made recently, to the birthplace of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Geneva and to the grave of Marcel Proust in Paris. My visit to Proust's grave gave me some of this missing sense, something like: “So he's not just an idea. He's really here."

I experienced something of the same sense when I recently visited Bletchley Park, Britain's code-breaking centre during World-War II, with a main purpose of finding out more about Alan Turing, who worked there throughout the War. As a vacation job (in 1960, I think, when I was an undergraduate) I worked at the National Physical Laboratory, where Alan Turing had worked after the War. I assisted in programming one of the world's first computers, the Turing-designed Automatic Computing Engine (ACE). The person whom I was assisting was writing a program to do cross correlation in a tracking task: now just a few lines of code but then, in ACE machine code, it needed an elaborate arrangement of ones and zeros and weeks of debugging. My first job after I got my PhD was again at the National Physical Laboratory, and it was then that I came across Turing's work on the foundations of artificial intelligence. The work that he did at Bletchley Park during the War, to decipher messages sent by the German Enigma machines, was among the most important contributions any individual made to the Allied cause. It fascinated me. In the hut that had been converted to an entrance to Bletchley Park, I found tears coming to my eyes, an indication of being in the presence of something larger than my own day-to-day concerns, and again an indication of the something that can seem missing from purely narrative accounts.

Yeast ethics and social space (Stretch beers for Valentine)

(Canada Day Eve)

After a month’s worth of conferences about food and land and society (a year of not traveling led to some overenthusiastic planning of meeting sessions), I am developing an appreciation for yeast.

Scholarly meetings give you many chances to think closely about mass-culture baked goods. Breakfasts, the one meal served at the CanadianAssociation for Food Studies meeting at Brock, had a lot of white bread, and bicycling around Sweden for the Relational Landscapes meeting (during a rail strike), I encountered many store-bakery versions of a cardamom bread I grew up making. And at the joint meetings of the Agriculture, Food, and Human ValuesSociety and the Association for the Study of Food and Society in Burlington, the Co-op had a fascinating spatial divide between extraordinarily artisanal breads and the plebian buns of the masses. (I allayed the anxieties of a bread-seeker agonizing over the ingredients of the hot dog buns I was looking for by pointing him toward the good bread section.)

All of these breads are enough to make one appreciate yeasts, and I made sure to feed my current resident starter as soon as I returned home. I am indebted to my Montreal colleague David Szanto for my current cultivation of this yeast community: it was the starter of his recently deceased dear friend Gigi, a starter for unpretentious and very flavorful bread. And it is promiscuously bubbling with my kitchen yeasts now, growing out in a warm metal bowl not long after midsummer, becoming part of the ecology of my home, and making me think about the disparity between the crucial function of yeasts and the prevalence with which we rely for functional metaphors on the extraordinarily available everyday functions that underpin bread and beer!

Warm Land Lunch: Sharing Stories for Eating

Domestic Confections, credit (c): Molly Balcom Raleigh

I am lucky enough to study food and food stories for a living—and on top of that, I get to work with a number of artists who play with food for their living (as with Molly Balcom Raleigh’s mouse nest confections project pictured here and to the left). Involving the construction of edible mouse nests representing what a mouse might be able to make from the various detritus of common domestic spaces, this project encouraged participants in the opening festivities to make themselves mouse nest sundaes, and as the artist explained: “Eating the nests at the end of the meal allows us to symbolically re-integrate the self with nature at the sites where it is most relevant to our lives: our homes and our bodies.” 

Despite the thoughtfulness and delight evident in this approach to food, a recent conversation on mindful eating art practice convened by St. Paul Artist in Residence Marcus Young revealed that it turns out that many of us still have trouble eating lunch.

Especially when I am in the midst of researching some particular labor atrocity or unbelievably mundane source of avoidable toxins, it is not surprising that it might be hard to shake off judgmental feelings about potential lunch fixings. So at the end of this extraordinarily long and cold winter, when the idea of a picnic on the warm grass seems like an astonishingly captivating way to reintegrate ourselves with nature, I will briefly share the idea I am thinking of as a "warm land lunch" series, responding to all the subtle but palpable pressures that keep lunch a distinctly third class meal despite its delightful potential as a rejuvenating repast in the center of our days.

Conversation amongst Molly, Marcus, and I along with our colleague Aki Shibata and Clouds in Water leader/teachers Sosan Flynn and Ken Ford made us realize how much we responded to these pressures: lunch seems so hard to prioritize, especially in the midst of busy days. And yet we all agreed on how rewarding it was to step away from the desk, set a space, enjoy the surface, the vessels, the implements, and the food, and to connect with the conviviality and social space of lunch--even, paradoxically, if we were doing so in silence, or only in virtual companionship, knowing, for example, that a companion elsewhere was also stopping to eat lunch.

We may be a world away from more formally convivial lunches, as in Japan, where Aki tells us shared lunch hours are still much more common than most of us have experienced. But the shared space of navigating the meaning and affect of lunch has been a compelling prospect for us, and we are considering what sorts of platforms provide enough scaffolding for a convivial lunch--neither stripping away the actual conviviality (in simulated virtual companionship) nor necessarily burdening the already difficult-to-justify time with additional sociality. While we dream up community picnics on the warm land (once this new layer of snow melts), I am suddenly hearing lunch stories from many colleagues (many unprompted--perhaps lunch romanticism is a feature of this time of stir-crazy fake springtime). Some reminisce about the daily departmental lunches they used to eat together. Others ask why we have stopped walking out (across the icy tundra of sidewalk) for companionable if occasional lunches. On the day after our conversation above, a colleague asked if I had time for lunch with that tone that says "I know you don't," and seemed surprised when I responded that we had to eat, so we might as well make time for it. On the walk to lunch, she told me about quiet eating spaces she had experienced in past jobs, where people brought brown bag lunches to a common room and ate in companionable silence. The promise of the warm land lunch seems just below the surface of this season, and I look forward to sharing how it sprouts.