Emotion In Stories Research Articles

Quantifying the retention of emotions across story retellings

Story retelling is a fundamental medium for the transmission of information between individuals and among social groups. Besides conveying factual information, stories also contain affective information. Though natural language processing techniques have advanced considerably in recent years, the extent to which machines can be trained to identify and track emotions across retellings is unknown. This study leverages the powerful RoBERTa model, based on a transformer architecture, to derive emotion-rich story embeddings from a unique dataset of 25,728 story retellings. The initial stories were centered around five emotional events (joy, sadness, embarrassment, risk, and disgust—though the stories did not contain these emotion words) and three intensities (high, medium, and low). Our results indicate (1) that RoBERTa can identify emotions in stories it was not trained on, (2) that the five emotions and their intensities are preserved when they are transmitted in the form of retellings, (3) that the emotions in stories are increasingly well-preserved as they experience additional retellings, and (4) that among the five emotions, risk and disgust are least well-preserved, compared with joy, sadness, and embarrassment. This work is a first step toward quantifying situation-driven emotions with machines.

Emotion in Stories: Facial EMG Evidence for Both Mental Simulation and Moral Evaluation.

Facial electromyography research shows that corrugator supercilii (“frowning muscle”) activity tracks the emotional valence of linguistic stimuli. Grounded or embodied accounts of language processing take such activity to reflect the simulation or “reenactment” of emotion, as part of the retrieval of word meaning (e.g., of “furious”) and/or of building a situation model (e.g., for “Mark is furious”). However, the same muscle also expresses our primary emotional evaluation of things we encounter. Language-driven affective simulation can easily be at odds with the reader's affective evaluation of what language describes (e.g., when we like Mark being furious). To examine what happens in such cases, we independently manipulated simulation valence and moral evaluative valence in short narratives. Participants first read about characters behaving in a morally laudable or objectionable fashion: this immediately led to corrugator activity reflecting positive or negative affect. Next, and critically, a positive or negative event befell these same characters. Here, the corrugator response did not track the valence of the event, but reflected both simulation and moral evaluation. This highlights the importance of unpacking coarse notions of affective meaning in language processing research into components that reflect simulation and evaluation. Our results also call for a re-evaluation of the interpretation of corrugator EMG, as well as other affect-related facial muscles and other peripheral physiological measures, as unequivocal indicators of simulation. Research should explore how such measures behave in richer and more ecologically valid language processing, such as narrative; refining our understanding of simulation within a framework of grounded language comprehension.

A mulher emocional: potências e riscos da feminilidade no discurso jornalístico

Este artigo traz uma análise do discurso de inspiração foucaultiana acerca de mulheres e emoções em reportagens sobre carreira nas revistas Veja, Época e Você S/A Edição para Mulheres. Nas novas configurações do trabalho, a “sensibilidade feminina” é exaltada como vantagem competitiva, desde que utilizada de maneira correta. Entretanto, as emoções também tornariam as mulheres inconstantes e perigosas. Há uma retórica do controle direcionada ao gênero feminino: suas emoções devem ser manejadas, a fim de serem transformadas em capital produtivo, evitando que causem riscos à ordem social. As matérias, imbuídas da aura da objetividade jornalística, atuam discursivamente como instrumentos da racionalidade neoliberal, ajudando a inscrever no indivíduo o imperativo do governo de si, e conformando sujeitos orientados para a performance, sem alterar a hierarquia tradicional de gênero.

Preschool interpersonal relationships predict kindergarten achievement: Mediated by gains in emotion knowledge

Using longitudinal data, this study tested a model in which preschool interpersonal relationships promoted kindergarten achievement in a pathway mediated by growth in emotion knowledge. The sample included 164 children attending Head Start (14% Hispanic-American, 30% African-American, 56% Caucasian; 56% girls). Preschool interpersonal relationships were indexed by student–teacher relationship closeness and positive peer interactions. Two measures of emotion knowledge (identifying emotions in photographs, recognizing emotions in stories) were assessed at the start and end of the preschool year. Structural equation models revealed that positive interpersonal relationships (with teachers and peers) predicted gains in emotion knowledge (identification, recognition) during the preschool year. Positive interpersonal relationships in preschool also predicted kindergarten achievement (controlling for initial preschool achievement); however, this association was mediated by gains in emotion knowledge during the preschool year. Implications are discussed for school readiness programs serving economically-disadvantaged children.

Review of Oatley (2012): The passionate muse: Exploring emotion in stories

In his 1999 article “Why action may be twice as true as fact: Fiction as cognitive and emotional simulation”, Keith Oatley argues that by triggering emotions, reading fiction can provide deeper insights than reading an expository text on the same subject. Reading fiction is like engaging in a type of simulation of social roles and interactions: through identifying with characters and adopting their goals, we can gain a better understanding of ourselves and others (Oatley, 1999; cf. Mar & Oatley, 2008). We may, for example, find out how we react in situations we have not previously encountered.

In Building a Script for an Emotion, Do Preschoolers Add Its Cause Before Its Behavior Consequence?

AbstractAn emotion concept is a script in which an emotion event is an ordered sequence of subevents from situational cause through bodily changes to behavioral consequence. As children build a script for each emotion, in what order do they add each subevent? Preschoolers (N = 108, three to five years), were asked to name the protagonist's emotion in stories consisting solely of either a cause or a consequence of one of six emotions. More children correctly inferred happiness, fear, sadness, and disgust from their causes than from their consequences, but more correctly inferred anger from its consequence than from its cause. (No significant difference was found for surprise.) Subevents are added to scripts in a different order for different emotions.

Narratives and Emotions: Revealing and Concealing Laughter

My paper deals with laughter as an expression of emotions in stories. I study laughter both as a communicative factor in fieldwork and as a stylistic device in narratives. When is laughter used as an effect in storytelling and what does this laughter mean? Is laughter always an expression of humour and com- ics? What else can it be an expression of? The stories that I use for analysing laughter are personal experience stories of giving birth. In these stories women use laughter in many ways, both in contact with me as an interviewer, together with me, and as a way of marking the meaning of the story. The women often laugh when they talk about corporeality, pain and difficulties during labour, but also when they perform a self-presentation with elements that almost hap- pened during birth. What do they reveal or conceal with laughter in narratives and what can the laughter reveal about the point of their narration?

The Place of Emotion in Stories Told by Children: An Exploratory Study

This study explored the relationship between developmental changes in children's understanding of emotions and their use of affective content (Wilkinson, Barnsley, Hanna, & Swan, 1980) and affective structure (Brewer & Lichtenstein, 1982) in the production of stories. We hypothesized that children with an advanced understanding of emotions would make more use of both affective content and affective structure. This relationship was found only for affective content, which was more advanced in girls than boys. Affective structure did not relate to affective understanding or sex but, rather, to verbal intelligence. The implications of these results for the part played by psychological processes in children's story telling are discussed.

Making sense of emotion in stories and social life

This paper is concerned with some limitations of the vignette methodology used in contemporary appraisal research and their implications for appraisal theory. We focus on two recent studies in which emotional manipulations were achieved using textual materials, and criticise the investigators' apparent implicit assumption that participation in everyday social reality is somehow comparable to reading a story. We take issue with three related aspects of this cognitive analogy between life and its narrative representation, by arguing that emotional reactions in real life are not necessarily mediated by symbolic processes, that people are involved participants of real life rather than neutral observers, and that in real life people's evaluations and emotions are typically part of an ongoing dialogue rather than the expression of a soliloquy. Results from these studies of emotional vignettes therefore tend to overestimate the importance of constructive, abstract, and individualistic processes in the everyday causation of social emotions. In real life, people do not necessarily have to calculate, transform, or internally represent the meaning of the dynamic situation in order to make emotional sense of what is happening to them in the social world.

Children's and adults' beliefs about emotion elicitation

Eight-year-old children and adult female college students were asked to describe situations in which each of six emotions would be felt (production task) and to judge which emotion would be felt in situations described by other subjects (judgment task). In addition, mothers of the child subjects were asked to judge descriptions generated by their own child and by other children. Data analysis showed that adults and children produced stories that could be classified into the same set of thematic categories. In addition, adults and children could accurately identify the emotion in stories produced by other adults and children. Last, mothers judged descriptions produced by other children as easily as descriptions produced by their own child.