Emotional effect and reminding in literary processing

Abstract

This paper presents a series of empirical studies to show some psychological characteristics of self-relevant information processing in literary vs. non- (or less) literary reading. Three experiments were conducted to study the emotional effect, and the verbalized remindings, of short literary, expository and/or descriptive texts on clearly similar topics and of similar length. The subjects were 288 students of an academically eminent secondary school in Budapest, males and females approximately in equal numbers, all aged 17. In each experiment different groups read only one of the texts which were all segmented into three parts. In experiment 1, following each segment, the subjects' task was to fill in a form which measured the most fundamental indices of emotional effect and, on completion of the reading, to give the formal-thematic effect on the basis of a rating. In experiment 2 the task was to write down all the earlier — direct or indirect — experiences the subjects were reminded of by any part of the given segment. The frequencies of different — more or less personal — content categories of remindings and other responses were measured. In experiment 3, two keywords, with which propositions were directly connected, or related, were given from each segment of the texts. The task was to put down all the earlier experiences the subjects were reminded of by them. As part of that experiment the members of the control group were given the same keywords. Beside the frequencies of the content categories, some formal characteristics of the responses were also measured. It was shown that though idiosyncrasies have a serious role in the self-relevant processing, a significant part of the variance of the effect can be ascribed to text characteristics. It is also apparent that while processing a literary text as a specific discourse, the reader relies not only upon his/her remindings coming from personally experienced, everyday life events directly, but to a great extent also upon the discourse interwoven with his/her earlier film, literary, music, fine arts experiences. A literary text exerts a strong influence on the reader's self because it often has multiple context cues and meanings. Remindings help with text-understanding insofar as the enrichment of the reader's identity takes places as an outcome of the cues in the text. General consequences from the point of view of the reader's self-system and of literary understanding as evaluative processing are discussed in connection with deviations in literary texts.