Review of Hogan (2003): The mind and its stories. Narrative universals and human emotion & Hogan (2011): What literature teaches us about emotion & Hogan (2011): Affective narratology. The emotional structure of stories

Book Review| September 01 2005 The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion; Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts: A Guide for Humanities The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion. By Patrick Colm Hogan. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. xii, 302 p.Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts: A Guide for Humanities. By Patrick Colm Hogan. New York: Routledge, 2003. 244 p. Frederick Luis Aldama Frederick Luis Aldama Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Comparative Literature (2005) 57 (4): 356–358. https://doi.org/10.1215/-57-4-356 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Frederick Luis Aldama; The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion; Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts: A Guide for Humanities. Comparative Literature 1 September 2005; 57 (4): 356–358. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/-57-4-356 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsComparative Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. University of Oregon2005 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Reviewed by: The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion Frederick Luis Aldama Hogan, Patrick Colm . 2003. The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion. New York: Cambridge University Press. $65.00 hc. 302 pp. In spite of the hustle-bustle of our everyday lives, we still take pause to read novels, short stories, and poems; watch films, television shows, and soap operas; and/or to hear someone recount a story. Storytelling in all its shapes and sizes is probably as old as the human species and continues to perform a vital function in the quotidian experiences of people worldwide. One of the main reasons for this is that narration acts on our emotions in very particular ways, some of them so important that they have contributed to humankind's survival, evolution, and development. Indeed, emotions play such a vital role because they reinforce our capabilities to feel empathy and to learn from other persons' experiences. In The Mind and Its Stories, Patrick Colm Hogan explores the universal storytelling capacities of the human mind while focusing on emotion and showing how the biological and social components of literary narrative and of emotion are equally universal. Here, he displays once more the innovative theorizing and research that has been his mark particularly in the articles and books he has been publishing since the mid 1990s, including On Interpretation (1995); Philosophical Approaches to the Study of Literature (2000); Colonialism and Cultural Identity (2000); The Culture of Conformism (2001); Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts (2003); and the forthcoming Empire and Poetic Voice. This list of titles points to a mind possessing an encyclopedic knowledge and a boundless curiosity for the scientific and philosophical endeavors that may shed a new light on literature, Hogan's true passion and ultimate focus. However, in The Mind and Its Stories this focus has broadened to literature as a whole, that is, literature in all its variety and richness as world literature, past and present. As a result, this book serves as a trailblazer in two domains: cognitive science and global comparative literature. Thanks to Hogan's efforts, cognitive science is now in a much better position to further explore and empirically verify the universal nature of emotions, for The Mind and Its Stories is a treasure-trove of data on emotions dug out from the literary texts and the literary forms and themes developed in historical periods from around the world. At the same time, the innovative methodology Hogan has [End Page 247] created and applied here to analyze narrative literature on many levels—thematic, structural, stylistic—shows a new way of "doing" comparative world literature and of bringing it to bear on scientific issues. As Hogan points out in the introduction, by now quite a few authors have linked literary study with cognitive science. But none of them has embarked on a cross-cultural study of "the relation between two crucial elements of literature and the human mind—narrative and emotion" (4). Drawing on research in psychology, linguistics, neurology, Indic literary theory, and philosophy, as well as on his own seemingly all-encompassing knowledge of literature, Hogan tackles the problem of explaining how storytelling works cross-culturally, affects and is affected by the emotions, and exhibits universal structures:: both from the point of view of the author/storyteller and the reader/audience. Hogan inscribes his study of literary universals—which may be viewed as an "anthropology of world literature"—within "an encompassing research program in cognitive science" (7). The Mind and Its Stories comprises seven chapters plus an introduction and an afterword. In chapters 1 and 2, Hogan presents the basic principles about literary universals and literary emotion. In chapter 3, he identifies two universal narrative structures: heroic tragi-comedy and romantic tragi-comedy. He argues that these structures are central because they are prominent across unrelated cultural traditions and because they are generated from "two contextually dependent universal prototypes for happiness" (11), namely the personal prototype (romantic union) and the social prototype (social domination). In chapter 4, he discusses the presence in many heroic narratives of an "epilogue of suffering" in which the story continues beyond its expected conclusion (that...

In the previous paper, Bill Seeley suggests that what follows from research into crossmodal perception for expression and emotion in the arts is that there is an emotional contour (i.e., a contour constitutive of the content of an emotion and potentially realizable across a range of media). As a response of sorts, I speculate as to what this might hold for philosophical and empirical enquiry into expression and emotion across the arts as well as into the nature of the emotions themselves.

There are profound, extensive, and surprising universals in literature, which are bound up with universals in emotion. Hogan maintains that debates over the cultural specificity of emotion are misdirected because they have ignored a vast body of data that bear directly on the way different cultures imagine and experience emotion - literature. This is the first empirically and cognitively based discussion of narrative universals. Professor Hogan argues that, to a remarkable degree, the stories people admire in different cultures follow a limited number of patterns and that these patterns are determined by cross-culturally constant ideas about emotion. In formulating his argument, Professor Hogan draws on his extensive reading in world literature, experimental research treating emotion and emotion concepts, and methodological principles from the contemporary linguistics and the philosophy of science. He concludes with a discussion of the relations among narrative, emotion concepts, and the biological and social components of emotion.

The Mind and Its Stories. Narrative Universals and Human Emotion

Stockwell, Peter. 2002. Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction. London and New York: Routledge. $115.00 hc. $33.95 sc. 176 pp. Gavins, Joanna, and Gerald Steen, eds. 2003. Cognitive Poetics in Practice. London and New York: Routledge. $125.00 hc. $34.95 sc. 173 pp. Fauconnier, Gilles and Mark Turner. 2002. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books. $21.00 sc. 396 pp. The three studies that are the subject of this discussion bear in common, among other things, an important assumption that touches intimately on the concerns of literary research and pedagogy. They assume that, in a post-Derridean world, not only is the quest to understand the processes of meaning-making still a valid one, but that [End Page 225] today, ironically, we may have at our disposal more instruments than ever before with which to explore how human beings communicate. Philosophers and literary scholars on both sides of the great Theory Divide are wondering alike, inevitably: What's next? How might we proceed in the wake of poststructuralism's rearrangement and even discrediting of the formalist and structuralist strategies that once provided our (admittedly foggy) windows onto communicative acts and the texts that encode them? To the authors and editors of these books, the tools literary scholars need not merely to dispense with the older paradigms but actually to surpass them in their ability to teach us about meaning-making are most readily and sensibly found in the cognitive sciences. These studies culminate (though in a limited way that I will discuss shortly) roughly twenty years of eavesdropping by a small contingent of literary scholars on conversations taking place within fields like cognitive psychology, linguistics, psycholinguistics, computer science, the cognitive neurosciences, cognitive evolution, evolutionary psychology, and others that fall under the widely interdisciplinary label "cognitive science" (and that generally tend to make those of us in the humanities cringe––with honest intimidation if not distaste). Literary scholars intrigued with recent advances in learning about the human brain/mind (learning spurred on by the invention of imaging technologies such as CAT scan, MRI, and OIS that allow scientists to view live brains in action) have been bringing to their roles as literary theorists and critics a conviction whose time has surely come: Simply put, they believe that our approaches to literary questions can and should be enriched by an acknowledgment of how the enabling and constraining behaviors of brains and minds contribute to literary experience. The diversity of titles now associated with this belief testifies to the expansion and increasing maturity of cognitive literary studies. To cite some of the major titles from just the past five years, including monographs, essay collections, and theater as well as literary studies: Alan Palmer, Fictional Minds (2004), Alan Richardson and Ellen Spolsky (eds.), The Work of Fiction: Cognition, Culture, and Complexity (2004), Patrick Colm Hogan, The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion and Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts: A Guide for Humanists (both 2003), David Herman (ed.), Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences (2003), Bruce McConachie, American Theater in the Culture of the Cold War: Producing and Contesting Containment, 1947-1962 (2003), Joseph Tabbi, Cognitive Fictions (2002), David Lodge, Consciousness and the Novel: Connected Essays (2002), Mary Thomas Crane, Shakespeare's Brain: Reading With Cognitive Theory (2001), Ellen Spolsky, Satisfying Skepticism: Embodied Knowledge in the Early Modern World (2001), and Blakey Vermeuele, The Party of Humanity: Writing Moral Psychology [End Page 226] in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2000). (Also, forthcoming in 2006 is Lisa Zunshine's Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel.) These works represent literary scholars' efforts to assimilate brain/mind science into a broad range of historical and close-textual readings; and as such, they risk being accused by colleagues in the humanities of being epistemologically naive, even parasitical, feeding off the...

Chudamani is one of the inconspicuous writers in Indian literature who is gradually gaining prominence in the recent past. Chudamani’s works are powerful and sensitive unveiling the reality of human beings in society and their psychological aspects. This research article aims to analyse a novella and three short stories of R. Chudamani and inquires about the human emotions especially fear portrayed in those stories. The major focus of the article is on the novella, Yamini, and the minor focus is on the three short stories: “A Knock at the Door”, “The Strands of the Void” and “Drought”. Yamini is the story of a girl Yamini, who is forced into the institution of marriage. “A Knock at the Door” is the narrative of two widows who safeguard their sister’s son from his father. “The Strands of the Void” explores the system of dowry in Indian society. “Drought” is the story of a married woman who tries to escape from the torments of her husband. This paper also scrutinizes the fear in the protagonists and the central characters in the above works. It also inspects how fear transmogrifies the characters in different situations.

Some recent writers on ethics, prominently Jonathan Haidt, have seen emotion and narrative as central to moral judgment and behavior. However, much of this work is not clear about the precise nature of emotion and narrative or the relation of the two to each other and to ethics. Research in distinct narrative traditions — a form of comparative literary study — offers a possible solution. The author has argued that a number of prototype-based story structures recur across a broad range of genetically and areally distinct traditions. These structures derive from emotion systems and general principles of emotion modulation and involve ideals that are both hedonic and ethical. We may better understand the complex relations among narrative, emotion, and morality in terms of these story universals, their sources in emotion systems, and their associated ideals, which collectively predict a range of ethical responses to any given situation. In addition, even the usual ethical orientations of emotions and prototypes may be altered through the particularization of stories. In this way, emotional response and initial emplotment bias ethical response and evaluation, but the former do not simply determine the latter. The author illustrates these points by the sometimes surprising similarities relating European, Chinese, and Indian works.

This chapter considers ethical prototypes, which give needed specificity to the very general ethical orientations defined by principles and parameters. In ethical decision and behavior, we are concerned with sequences of actions and the motivations guiding these actions. In other words, we are concerned with stories. In this chapter, I argue that the prototypes at issue in specifying our ethical orientations are, most importantly, the universal story structures that I have sought to isolate in earlier works – heroic, romantic, sacrificial, family separation, seduction, revenge, and criminal investigation. These narrative structures are inseparable from human emotion systems. Indeed, story universals are shaped by emotion–motivation systems (along with some general patterns in emotion intensification); those systems (and patterns) account for their universality. In addition, these story genres are of crucial importance for the way we think about and respond to various worldly concerns, such as politics. The third chapter extends these arguments to ethics.

Previous articleNext article No AccessSymposium on Morality and LiteratureNarrative Emotions: Beckett's Genealogy of LoveMartha NussbaumMartha Nussbaum Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Ethics Volume 98, Number 2Jan., 1988 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/292939 Views: 32Total views on this site Citations: 29Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1988 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Michael Eggert, Axel Zweck Narrative Scharniere – Zur Vermittlung von Emotionalität und Zukunftsperspektiven, (May 2022): 85–109.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-35890-7_4Daria A. Eismann “MY ENTIRE BODY IS A WOUND”: PAIN, CORPOREALITY AND THE “OTHER” IN PATRIA BY FERNANDO ARAMBURU, (Jan 2022).https://doi.org/10.31338/uw.9788323555902.pp.201-232Andeline dos Santos Awareness of Emotions as Co-Storying, (Sep 2022): 345–362.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08556-7_17Moritz E. Wigand, Paul Hoff, Florian Steger, Thomas Becker Accepting the Incomprehensible, Journal of Nervous & Mental Disease 209, no.1010 (Oct 2021): 697–701.https://doi.org/10.1097/NMD.0000000000001374Andrei-Bogdan Popa Affective Refuge in the Work of Samuel Beckett, East-West Cultural Passage 21, no.11 (Jan 2022): 110–128.https://doi.org/10.2478/ewcp-2021-0007Britt Johanne Farstad Future Urban Environments in Science Fiction: Initiated Thought Experiments, (May 2021).https://doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.98245Manya Lempert Tragedy and the Modernist Novel, 22 (Aug 2020).https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108865616Daniel J. Goodey A Capabilities Approach Analysis of Evangelii Gaudium and Its Significance for Catholic Learning Environments on LGBT + Issues, Religious Education 114, no.55 (Sep 2019): 640–651.https://doi.org/10.1080/00344087.2019.1659747Vinh Nguyen, Thy Phu, Y-Dang Troeung Refugee Compassion and the Politics of Embodied Storytelling: A Critical Conversation, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 33, no.22 (Jun 2018): 441–445.https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2018.1445591Nadia Louar Beckett's Bodies in the Trilogy, or Life as a Pensum, Journal of Beckett Studies 27, no.11 (Apr 2018): 69–82.https://doi.org/10.3366/jobs.2018.0221Cheng Yuan Deliberative Emotion, (Jan 2019): 89–120.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-8651-9_4Julian Murphet On the Mortification of Novelistic Discourse in Three Novels, Journal of Beckett Studies 26, no.11 (Apr 2017): 39–52.https://doi.org/10.3366/jobs.2017.0186Alys Moody A Machine for Feeling: Ping 's Posthuman Affect, Journal of Beckett Studies 26, no.11 (Apr 2017): 87–102.https://doi.org/10.3366/jobs.2017.0189John D. Lantos Reason, Emotion, and Implanted Devices, The American Journal of Bioethics 16, no.88 (Jul 2016): 1–2.https://doi.org/10.1080/15265161.2016.1199608Laura Stark Emotional causality in dynamistic Finnish–Karelian folk belief, Scandinavian Journal of History 41, no.33 (May 2016): 369–387.https://doi.org/10.1080/03468755.2016.1179828Jochen Kleres Narrative des Mitgefühls: Methodischer Ansatz und Anwendung, (Jun 2015): 267–287.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-01654-8_14Michelle Voss Roberts Tasting the divine: the aesthetics of religious emotion in Indian Christianity, Religion 42, no.44 (Oct 2012): 575–595.https://doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2011.638089Ruben Borg Putting the Impossible to Work: Beckettian Afterlife and the Posthuman Future of Humanity, Journal of Modern Literature 35, no.44 (Jul 2012): 163–180.https://doi.org/10.2979/jmodelite.35.4.163JOCHEN KLERES Emotions and Narrative Analysis: A Methodological Approach, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 41, no.22 (Nov 2010): 182–202.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-5914.2010.00451.xDavid S. 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Limitations in the mirrored “understanding” of emotion, Synthese 175, no.22 (Mar 2009): 219–239.https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-009-9499-7Adia Mendelson-Maoz Ethics and Literature: Introduction, Philosophia 35, no.22 (Jul 2007): 111–116.https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-007-9068-6Andrew Abbott Against Narrative: A Preface to Lyrical Sociology, Sociological Theory 25, no.11 (Mar 2007): 67–99.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9558.2007.00298.xSusan Mooney Feeling Fear, Narrating Feelings: The Decomposing Masculine Subject in Molloy, Malone Dies , and The Unnamable, Journal of Beckett Studies 16, no.1-21-2 (Jan 2006): 204–222.https://doi.org/10.3366/jobs.2007.16.1-2.18P. 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The surrounding world has a strong impact on the way we feel and perceive the events that happens in daily life. The power of environments to elicit emotions in humans has been widely studied in experimental psychology by using exposure to photographs or real situations. These researches do not reproduce the vividness of events in ordinary life and do not permit to control the situations that happen within. By reproducing a realistic scenario similar to daily life and by controlling the social narratives happening within, Virtual Reality (VR) is a powerful tool to investigate the effect of environments on humans’ feelings and emotions. In this study we have animated the emotional content of a realistic virtual scenario with a dynamic scene in order to introduce a novel approach to investigate the effect of environments in human feeling based on the Emotional Narrative Virtual Environment (ENVE) paradigm. A sample of 36 subjects experimented 3 ENVEs with a Fear, Disgust and Happy emotional content, made to live with a social narratives, in an immersive VR setup. Results showed the ability of ENVE to elicit specific emotional state in participants and corroborate the idea that the ENVE approach can be used in environmental psychology or to treat persons with mental disease.

Human emotions unfold over time, and more affective computing research has to prioritize capturing this crucial component of real-world affect. Modeling dynamic emotional stimuli requires solving the twin challenges of time-series modeling and of collecting high-quality time-series datasets. We begin by assessing the state-of-the-art in time-series emotion recognition, and we review contemporary time-series approaches in affective computing, including discriminative and generative models. We then introduce the first version of the Stanford Emotional Narratives Dataset (SENDv1): a set of rich, multimodal videos of self-paced, unscripted emotional narratives, annotated for emotional valence over time. The complex narratives and naturalistic expressions in this dataset provide a challenging test for contemporary time-series emotion recognition models. We demonstrate several baseline and state-of-the-art modeling approaches on the SEND, including a Long Short-Term Memory model and a multimodal Variational Recurrent Neural Network, which perform comparably to the human-benchmark. We end by discussing the implications for future research in time-series affective computing.

The four-phased plot which consists of introduction, development, turn and conclusion in the long-story structure tends to be patterned and schematized. The behavior of characters is in line with the beginning of human beings and the plot of comic strips basically has four phases. It is, however, not a simple arrangement but a complex one which was developed by organizing patterns of human power, behavior and emotions. With the results from a survey with college students studying comic strips, this study aims to categorize four characters from the archetypal system by Carol Pearson, four phases of the hero`s journey by Joseph Campbell, and the four phases of the plot based on Aristotle`s theory, which is the frame of the comic strip structure through supporting evidence extracted from comic strips in an integrated way. In this study, the categorization is performed by simplifying and systemizing a character`s life cycle, which is a factor of a story structure in complex comic strips. This study is to identify what comic strip writers express by using the metaphor in the complicated long-story structure of comic strips This study reveals that the structure of introduction, development, turn and conclusion based on the plot theory by Aristotle is the metaphor of human life and fate and that the phases of development in the archetypal system by Carol Pearson, a Jung researcher influenced by Jung`s theory are the metaphor of human life and fate. Also, the theories of Joseph Campbell, who also was influenced by Jung, are the metaphor of human life and fate as they projected complex emotions of joy, anger, sorrow, and pleasure onto the archetype of heroes and used the metaphor of the hero`s journey. Lastly, the theories are introduced with the approach of `guide to screenwriters` by Christopher Vogler. Meanwhile, this metaphor is the objective and goal of this study. The comic strips selected for this study seem to have long complex stories which have characters leaving their homes, going through adventures and difficulties, meeting the world in another way, experiencing tension, competition, wars, and hardship and returning home with compensation. They grow mentally and psychologically through their journeys and finally become heroes. They express the meaning of our introspection in a narrative through plots and images of comic strips. This appears complex but the basic structure of long comic strips has four phases of plot. The life style of an extraordinary character traveling for adventures and growing in long comic strips can be divided into four phases symbolizing childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and senescence and it is a psychological growth process. The archetypes of the character can be divided into four phases and the growth process can be explained. The hero`s journey symbolized by the character can be also divided into four phases. Through theories, the complex arrangement of four-phased plots in comic strips corresponds with the growth process of introduction, development, turn and conclusion through the stages of life. At the same time, this study found that the characters becoming heroes are the metaphor of introspection and that the characters` growth and life correspond with the four phases in life through long comic strips. Long stories in long comic strips written by comic strip writers show that characters go on their journeys and change their lives through hardship and difficulty by logical construction of plot and their growth processes are presented in archetypal images and they reach introspection as heroes. The readers share time and space through images in comic strips and realize that they had the same experience as the characters emotionally by being moved by the stories.

In recent psychology study, emotional intelligence (EI), a crucial factor in determining both individual and social wellbeing, has received a lot of attention. The aim of this study is to investigate the concept of emotional intelligence in the framework of the Ramayana, an ancient Indian epic. Acknowledging the ageless quality of the Ramayana and its lasting influence on cultural storytelling, this study aims to reveal the subtleties of emotional intelligence demonstrated by its main characters. Through exploring the emotional spheres of figures like Hanuman, Sita, Lakshmana, and Rama, we hope to extract lessons that connect the knowledge of traditional mythology with the current conversation on emotional intelligence. The significance of this study lies in the potential to unearth ageless lessons and principles that transcend temporal and cultural boundaries. By dissecting the emotional intelligence portrayed in the Ramayana, we aspire to contribute to the broader understanding of human emotions, interpersonal dynamics, and ethical decision-making. This exploration not only offers a unique lens through which to view emotional intelligence but also sheds light on the cultural underpinnings that influenced the narrative construction of the epic. Analysing the emotional intelligence exhibited by Ramayana characters offers a wealth of insights, since emotional intelligence is a crucial factor in determining individual achievement, social cohesiveness, and leadership efficacy. This study attempts to stimulate conversations about the enduring value of emotional intelligence by establishing links between traditional wisdom and contemporary psychology ideas. This will help people gain a better understanding of the complex interactions between emotions in the human experience. By means of this transdisciplinary investigation, we aim to enhance the conversation on emotional intelligence by including the ageless knowledge contained within the Ramayana's story structure.

To understand the structure and function of stories, we need to understand emotion. Stories are fundamentally particular causal sequences. But the part of causal sequences that constitutes a prototypical story is determined by the sensitivities and organization of our emotion systems. For instance, our sense of what constitutes an event in a story is in part a function of the processes involved in the development and experience of an emotion episode. Literary stories (as opposed to, say, an engineer’s account of how a radiator cracked) are characterized by their stress on agents pursuing (emotion-defined) goals, as well as their manipulation of the reader’s interpersonal stance toward those agents (roughly, empathic, antipathetic, or ambivalent; literary stories also take up the reader’s other emotional responses, such as interest). Cross-culturally recurring story genres (romantic, heroic, sacrificial, and so forth) are generated from the protagonists’ goals, which are defined, in their general properties, by human emotion systems. Recurring features of story development result from ordinary psychological processes that intensify the emotions elicited by the outcome of the story (e.g., joy at the reunion of lovers).