Scientific Study of Literature - Volume 9, Issue 2, 2019

Previous studies suggest that narrative fiction promotes social justice by increasing empathy, but critics have argued that the partiality of empathy severely limits its effectiveness as an engine of social justice, and that what needs to be developed is universal compassion rather than empathy. We created Compassion-Cultivating Pedagogy (CCP) to target the development of two social-cognition capabilities that entail compassion: (1) recognition of self-other overlap and (2) cognizance of the situational, uncontrollable causes of bad character, bad behavior, and bad life-outcomes. Employing a pre/post within- and between-subjects design, we found that students in the CCP classes, but not students in conventionally taught classes, improved in these two areas of social cognition and also exhibited increased preference for compassionate social policies for stigmatized groups. This finding suggests that pedagogy can play a significant role in literature’s contribution to social justice, and that further efforts to develop and test pedagogies for improving social cognition are warranted.

Reading fiction is beneficial for various social skills, although reading has become less and less popular with younger generations. This study investigated whether reading a chapter of a fictional story in virtual reality (VR) can make the reading experience more appealing and increase intention to read the story further. A between-subject experiment (N = 83) was conducted to compare the effect of a printed book and a VR reading environment on narrative absorption, empathy with fictional characters, and intention to read. The results show that VR enhances intention to read, via a serial mediation of transportation into the story world and affective empathy. These findings indicate that VR can be effectively exploited for promoting reading.

There is a growing research literature on phonetic symbolism in poetry, sometimes with incongruent results. Through a theoretical structural analysis we show that, (a) individual speech sounds have (sometimes conflicting) potentials to suggest elementary percepts, such as abruptness, hardness, smoothness; and (b) from these elementary percepts some general psychological atmosphere may be abstracted that may be individuated in specific emotions as ‘love,’ ‘joy,’ or ‘anger,’ by semantic feature-addition. This proposal can reconcile incongruous research results. Sound-symbolic lexical entries are governed by similar principles, but fossilized. Large-scale statistical investigation may reveal significant sound-symbolic effects only when the same phonemes repeat throughout the poem. They may, however, miss conspicuous local sound effects, revealed only by local analysis. Some sceptical conclusions in the research literature may be due to this phenomenon. The proposed method may account not only for statistical correlations, but also for the perception of a pervasive emotional atmosphere in a poem.

Tsur and Gafni (T&G) claim that individual sounds can suggest “elementary percepts,” which, depending on the context, can evoke “specific emotions.” However, their proposal suffers from a lack of a theoretical framework and embedding of the theory in the broader scholarly literature. In terms of existing emotion theories and in line with the results of our previous neurocognitive studies on the topic, the proposed differentiation between these two levels of processing can be best represented by two affective dimensions of arousal and valence, respectively. In addition, our statistical measure for assessing the basic affective tone of texts suggests that the use of mere or rational frequencies of occurrence of all phonemes in a poem – instead of a focus on foregrounded and salient phonemes – may be a further reason for discrepancies of results of previous studies.