Appendix 1: Experimental Results: The Cognitive Science of Literary Reading
As we mention in Chap. 1 , in the last twenty-five years , there have been many studies, pursued with scientific rigor, that demonstrate the fact that reading literary fiction effects changes in people that increase particular forms of cognition and fellow-feeling. How these effects are brought about has until recently been analyzed and discussed, usually in literary studies, but rarely by means of scientific protocols. Over the past twenty-five years, however, data has been published, derived from rigorous testing, which shed light on this phenomenon and indeed allowed us to discern a causal relationship between reading fiction and increased empathy and vigorous enactments of Theory of Mind (ToM). Some of these studies have shown howâby means of the analysis of literary features âliterary fiction goes about effecting these changes. But besides these âinterpretativeâ analyses, many other studies have demonstrated by means of empirical, quantitative and qualitative research techniques that reading literary fiction leads to enhanced ToM, measurable transportation states ( âvicarious experiencesâ), and increased empathy. As we suggested in Part I of the Introduction, these phenomena are desirable for people in the healthcare field. The exciting development of this data has come about through a confluence of studies involving a number of disciplines including cognitive and social psychology, narratology (including stylistics and linguistics ), neuro-imaging , and, as we note throughout this book, literary semiotics and medical pedagogy . (âSemioticsâ is the systematic study of âsignsâ and the manner in which meaning is generated. It grew out of linguistics and logic in the early twentieth century. For a historical and cultural account of why this is so, see Schleifer 2018a ). In this appendix, we set forth a short summary of this research by focusing on a small number of these studies that are representative of the wider empirical work of the last two decades. Taken as a whole, this work in cognitive and affective science describes how reading literary fiction (variously defined as âwriterly,â âpolyphonic,â and âstylistically sophisticated discourseâ), creates in the reader the desirable effects of enhanced empathy , more rigorous ToM , and the vicarious experiences that Transportation Theory analyzes.
In 1994, D. S. Miall, an English professor, and Don Kuiken , a psychology professor, both from Alberta, Canada, demonstrated that âforegroundingâ is systematically correlated with increased reading times and changes in affect (emotional response), and it is also correlated with readersâ judgment of âstrikingnessâ in a series of experiments utilizing student-readers. The term â foregrounding â was coined in the 1930s by Jan MukaĹovskĂ˝ , a semiotician and member of the Prague School of Linguistics . By âforegroundingâ he means âthe range of stylistic variations that occur in literature, whether at the phonetic level (e.g., alliteration, rhyme), the grammatical level (e.g., inversion, ellipsis), or the semantic level (e.g., metaphor, irony)â (Miall and Kuiken 1994 : 390). In Part II of Chap. 1 , we describe and examine thirteen of these âfeaturesâ in relation to Grace Paleyâs short story, âA Conversation with My Father.â These features, we suggest, are useful in developing the careful engagement with the literary narratives and poems of our text-anthologyâand, importantly, in the careful engagement with patientsâ stories in the clinic. While these features can occur in all language uses, Miall and Kuiken argue (following MukaĹovskĂ˝ ) that they are systematically present in literary texts: foregrounding, they argue, âenables literature to present meaning with an intricacy and complexity that ordinary language does not normally allowâ ( 1994 : 390). One such measureâusing a term we discuss in Part II of Chap. 1 âis the ability of literature to â defamiliarize â experience and make it new. â Defamiliarization ,â as we mention in Chap. 1 , is a term developed by Russian scholars in the early twentieth century to allow for the systematic study of the ways that discursive artâliterary narrativeâprovokes effects and responses in readers/listeners. Miall and Kuiken measured the effects of foregrounding in four formal studies of readers that measure the âstrikingnessâ of literature (i.e., the attention it arrests by means of defamiliarization), the provocation of feeling (affect), and the ways that foregrounding increases reading time.
Much work has been done on the emotive responses to reading literary fiction (Appendix 5 refers to some of this material). In 2002, Miall and Kuiken published an innovative research paper that showed that readers of literary fiction were moved emotionally by certain passages, and when they reflected on that emotion they discovered that the passages and attendant emotion had stimulated reflections in their real world lives or in other texts. (This result corresponds with the features describing the borderline between everyday life and literary fiction in Part II of Chap. 1 .) Furthermore, they found that the reflections stimulated âboundary crossing.â Specifically, they demonstrate that âthe experience of feelings in one situation leads to the re-experiencing of those feelings in situations that are similarâ ( 2002 : 226). This phenomenon, as we note in the vignette in Chap. 4 , precisely occurred in Dr. Vannattaâs practice when he re-experienced feelings provoked by Toni Morrisonâs novel Beloved in his interchange with a patient. Miall an...