Abstract
Humans are deeply affected by stories, yet it is unclear how. In this study, we explored two aspects of aesthetic experiences during narrative engagement - literariness and narrative fluctuations in appraised emotional intensity. Independent ratings of literariness and emotional intensity of two literary stories were used to predict blood-oxygen-level-dependent signal changes in 52 listeners from an existing fMRI dataset. Literariness was associated with increased activation in brain areas linked to semantic integration (left angular gyrus, supramarginal gyrus, and precuneus), and decreased activation in bilateral middle temporal cortices, associated with semantic representations and word memory. Emotional intensity correlated with decreased activation in a bilateral frontoparietal network that is often associated with controlled attention. Our results confirm a neural dissociation in processing literary form and emotional content in stories and generate new questions about the function of and interaction between attention, social cognition, and semantic systems during literary engagement and aesthetic experiences.
Highlights
Humans are deeply affected by stories, yet it is unclear how
Emotional intensity ratings had relatively small standard errors and followed a continuous trend across each story, with rises at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end (Fig. 1a)
These ratings were used as parametric predictors to model BOLD activity in an independent group of participants who listened to the same stories while their brain activity was measured with functional MRI (fMRI) for comprehension and enjoyment without being asked to pay attention to emotion or literary language
Summary
Humans are deeply affected by stories, yet it is unclear how. In this study, we explored two aspects of aesthetic experiences during narrative engagement - literariness and narrative fluctuations in appraised emotional intensity. We investigate whether two different aspects of aesthetic engagement—appreciation of stylistic form of literary language and emotional intensity of fluctuations in the plot (e.g., suspense) are neurally dissociable or share common activations (e.g., in reward systems). This exploratory study further aims to generate hypotheses for neuroimaging and behavioural research on literary aesthetics and other narrative art traditions (e.g., films, theatre). Narratives fluctuate over their durations in the literary language used and emotional intensity (suspense) conveyed. While everyday language contains foregrounding and stylistic features used in literature, the quality that differentiates a piece of literature from our daily discourse is the systematic use of such features in conjunction with skilful narration
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