End Of Story Research Articles

A Missing Mechanism of Effect: How People Who Habitually Replot Stories React Differently (Or Not so Differently) to Melanoma Narratives.

When stories have undesirable endings, readers often engage in replotting, meaning they imagine alternative plotlines that could change the unwanted ending. Recent research has found that both the cognitive and emotional components of replotting serve as mechanisms of narrative persuasion. Building on this work, the current study assessed if people who habitually replot are more persuaded by a tragic story ending than those who do not, testing hypotheses with melanoma narratives. Cognitive and emotional (i.e., anger, anxiety, sadness, and hope) aspects of replotting were tested as mechanisms of this proposed interaction. Participants (N = 432) were randomized into a 2 (protagonist death vs. survival) x 6 (specific melanoma story) between-subjects online narrative message experiment. Participants who habitually replot had significantly higher melanoma prevention intentions after reading a death (compared to a survival) ending. This effect was not present for other participants. However, counter to hypotheses, the cognitive and emotional aspects of actual replotting did not explain the effect, meaning habitual replotters were not more likely to replot the death ending or experience replotting emotion than other participants were. Future research is needed to determine why habitual replotters are more persuaded by unwanted story endings than other audience members are.

The rise of study skills at Strathclyde (and our part in its downfall): a bildungsroman

In 2012, three members of staff were recruited by the University of Strathclyde to sit in a room and talk to students. That was the whole of the plan. That is not how this story ends. The talking was supposed to ‘help’ students to do things ‘right’. That is not what we spoke about. That year, the student-facing part of the Centre for Academic Practice and Learning Enhancement (CAPLE) established in 1987, which at its height consisted of six permanent academics with varied research interests within the, then emergent, field of Learning Development (LD), was replaced by a generic Study Skills Service, staffed by LD practitioners with a considerable collective experience and who shared a vision that was more critical and looked to a more authentically (learning) developmental approach (Asher, 2024). In so doing, the university had created a service model which we would spend the next nine years dismantling (or, to be more accurate, redeveloping). What follows is our story. The story of how the Learner Development Service (LDS) came into being, and how the spaces and places we have inhabited (both hostile and hospitable) have shaped our practices (Gravett et al., 2023) and how, in June 2022, we took up residency in a dedicated LDS Centre designed by us for us. To date, we have occupied three physical locations and been positioned under three different university services. These spaces and places have defined what we could do but they have also informed the design of our current physical, virtual and conceptual environment, as this paper details. This session highlighted the need for Learning Development practitioner resilience and perseverance in difficult circumstances. It foregrounds the usefulness of initiating, developing, and nurturing productive and mutually rewarding professional relationships with academic departments, course leaders and individual academics in order to advance the growth of Learning Development provision in institutions.

Schema-driven prediction effects on episodic memory across the lifespan.

The predictive processing framework posits that one of the main functions of the brain is to anticipate the incoming information. Internal models facilitate interactions with the world by predicting future states against which actual evidence is compared. The difference between predicted and actual states, the prediction error (PE), signals novel information. However, how PE affects cognitive processing downstream is not fully understood: one such aspect pertains to how PE influences episodic memories, and whether those effect on memory differ across the lifespan. We examine the relationship between PE and episodic memory in children, young and older adults. We use a novel paradigm whereby rich visual narratives are used to build action schemas that enable probing different mnemonic aspects. To create different levels of PE, we manipulate the story endings to be either expected, neutral or unexpected with respect to the unfolded action. We show that (i) expected endings are better encoded than neutral endings and (ii) unexpected endings improve the encoding of mismatching events and other aspects of the narrative. These effects are differentially modulated across the lifespan with PE-driven encoding being more prominent in children and young adults and with schema integration playing a larger role on memory encoding in older adults. These results highlight the role of predictions by enriching past experiences and informing future anticipations.This article is part of the theme issue 'Elements of episodic memory: lessons from 40 years of research'.

PLIGHT OF PARTITION IN KHUSHWANT SINGH’S TRAIN TO PAKISTAN

In August 1947, the British left Indian Subcontinent after almost 200 years. British India was divided into two independent Nations - India and Pakistan. The distribution of human was based on the religion. Pakistan had the majority of Muslims while India having Hindu majority. This division of Indian subcontinent and the formation of two independent nations is known as ‘partition’ in history. The leaders who dreamt of the partition wanted to free the land from the oppression of British Raj. But they couldn’t guess that right after the end of a struggle story, another will start. A huge religious clash emerged throughout the land. Muslims were forced to march towards Pakistan while Hindus and Sikhs were forced to march towards India. Most of them literally had no idea why the English left India, why they are leaving their homes and whether they will ever return or not. Khushwant Singh's novel Train to Pakistan pictures how a peaceful land turns into a death-land after the partition. The paper seeks to shed lights on the plight of Partition detailed in Khushwant Singh's Train to Pakistan and attempts to analyze the horrible experience of puzzled common people.

"What Does it Matter?": Reading Within Architectural Spaces in Dickens's Hard Times

Abstract: In this article, I analyze the progression of Louisa Gradgrind's imaginative and emotional interior life in Charles Dickens's Hard Times . I integrate Gaston Bachelard's theory of the intrinsic relationship between imagination and architectural spaces in The Poetics of Space (1958) with Cassandra Falke's theoretical approach to learning empathy through reading literature in The Phenomenology of Love and Reading (2016) in order to create a critical framework. This framework then illustrates Dickens's use of domestic spaces to guide his readers experientially through Louisa's interior healing and development throughout the novel. I argue that Dickens desires his readers to believe by the end of Louisa's story that this inner wholeness is also possible and achievable for them through reading literature.

Motivating Engagement with Literature: Using the Individual Story Ending (ISE) Method to Reveal Personal Reading Experiences

AbstractThe Individual Story Ending (ISE) is an effective and appealing activity for students of every age. The method requires students—as a group or individually—to devise an ending to an excerpt at a turning point in a fictional narrative. Students can read the excerpt themselves, or the teacher can read it aloud to everyone. The ISE method can be applied to any creative activity and can be developed in various ways. While most teachers already use ISEs, this article suggests ways of building an entire learning process around the method and how ISEs can be used to initiate reading engagement and discussion of different themes.

Stories and Selves: A Twisted Love Story about the Meaning of Life

AbstractI argue that stories are ‘equipment for living’ in two senses: retrospectively, they provide ‘configurational comprehension’ of a temporal sequence of events; prospectively, they offer templates for action. Narrative conceptions of the self appear well poised to leverage these functional roles for stories into an intuitively compelling view of self-construction as self-construal. However, the narrative conception defines selves in terms of the lives they live: a self is the protagonist in a lifelong story. And narrative structure is itself defined by ‘retrospective necessity’: the meaning of events within a story is given by their contribution to that story's ending. Together, this entails that life stories hold selves metaphysically, epistemically, and practically hostage to their ends. Fortunately, narratives are just one species of interpretive frame. I suggest some alternative types of frames, including identity labels and metaphors, that support configurational comprehension, action guidance, and self construction without shackling selves to their lives’ ends.

Mothers' negative focus during memory‐sharing conversations is linked to negative interpretation and memory biases in young children

AbstractParent‐guided reminiscing helps children learn how to interpret and recollect personal experiences. These interpretive abilities are important because many experiences are ambiguous, and a tendency toward negative interpretation is associated with emotional disorders. Here, we explore whether naturally‐occurring variations in parent‐guided reminiscing are associated with children's interpretation and recall of novel ambiguous events. Mothers and their children (aged 5–6 years) reminisced about three shared negative events. Next, children were read several stories that described ambiguous social situations and were asked to invent endings that involved making an inference about motives of others in the stories. Later, children were asked questions to elicit story recall. Mothers who used more negative terms during reminiscing had children who were more likely to invent negative story endings and distort story recall negatively. Thus, mothers who frame memory‐sharing conversations with children negatively might put them at risk for developing negative interpretation and memory biases.

Crosslingual Transfer Learning for Arabic Story Ending Generation

In the field of natural language processing, the task of generating story endings (SEG) requires not only a deep understanding of the narrative context but also the ability to formulate coherent conclusions. This study delves into the use of crosslingual transfer learning to address the challenges posed by the scarcity of Arabic data in SEG, proposing the utilization of extensive English story corpora as a solution. We evaluated the efficacy of multilingual models, such as mBART, mT5, and mT0, in generating Arabic story endings, assessing their performance in both zero-shot and few-shot scenarios. Despite the linguistic complexities of Arabic and the inherent challenges of crosslingual transfer, our findings demonstrate the potential of these multilingual models to transcend linguistic barriers, significantly contributing to the domain of natural language processing across different languages. This research has significant implications for generating creative text and improving multilingual natural language processing in resource-limited language contexts

Similarities and Differences in Revenge - A Comparison between Lu Xun's Forging the Swords and Wang Zengqi's Revenge

In the history of Chinese new literature, the theme of revenge has rich artistic expression. In Lu Xun's “Cast Sword”, the revenge between the ruler between the eyebrows and the “black man” Yan Zhiao shows the glory of the avenger's humanity, and also expresses the doubt about the meaning of the act of “revenge” itself. Wang Zengqi's Revenge, on the other hand, reveals the struggle and relief in the psychology of revenge by constructing a symbolic revenge scene. This study takes Lu Xun's Forging the Swords and Wang Zengqi's Revenge as examples to compare the difference of the action of “revenge” in the two works. Lu Xun's Forging the Swords and Wang Zengqi's Revenge are two revenge-themed novels, which are based on the same revenge story, but show different forms in characterisation and story ending. Both of them also show the characters' revenge and resistance to revenge, and the incompleteness of revenge, so as to deconstruct the revenge. This difference and similarity is caused by the writers' personal experience, social and period background, and is a reflection of the influence of a specific period on the aesthetic value orientation.

Grandma Ruth’s UP Truck Stop

Is a digital copy of a loved as socially valuable as the real person? Is there an advantage if being able to permanently lose the ones we love? In this work of philosophical short story fiction, Rachel receives a letter while at University informing her that her Uncle Stewart has passed away. She returns to the small town for the funeral and talks with Grandma Ruth, the local restaurant owner. Grandma Ruth sets Rachel up a date, but things don’t go quite as planned. Rachel confronts Grandma Ruth and finds out that she has slowly been replacing the town citizens with robot copies in order to keeping the dying town’s population from dwindling to zero. The story ends with Grandma Ruth asking Rachel to take over the responsibility of maintaining her families, and the towns, robot population.

The Angel in the Juniper

Are the pious loved by the gods because they are pious, or are they pious because they are loved by the gods?” In this work of philosophical short story fiction, Professor Adamson and the narrator discuss Euthyphro’s dilemma. The narrator is invited by her professor to follow her into the woods and to meet a reclusive revolutionary leader. The professor, and the revolutionary group, want to overthrow the government because voting rights, and other civil rights, have been severely restricted by the government. The legal ability to change the government through voting is a “near impossibility.” On her way to meet the leader, the narrator meets an angel who informs her that the future revolution will fail, and many will be hurt in the process. The angel tells the narrator she must kill her professor to help humanity. The narrator is unsure what to do and, during their walk, discusses the dilemma she is in; a practical application of Euthyphro’s dilemma. The story ends in the final moment, knife in hand, when the narrator is about to decide what she will do.

Iterative Adversarial Attack on Image-Guided Story Ending Generation

Iterative Adversarial Attack on Image-Guided Story Ending Generation

The Rupture or Noah in the Qur'ān

This article provides a semiotic study of the account of Noah in Sūrat Hūd, chapter 11 of the Qur’ān. Our analysis opens with a discussion of the academic literature and the story’s internal Qur’ānic context. Noah’s story is said to illustrate the Qur’ānic debate of continuity and rupture in relationships between believers and unbelievers. The Qur’ān’s preference for a final break with unbelievers is indicated by the flood, but the argument among believers—in reference to early Muslims—about whether to maintain ties with or reject unbelievers is crucial to the Qur’ānic story of Noah. Thus, Noah’s story ends with the start of a new cycle of conflict and disagreement between the powerful and corrupt on the one hand and the truthful and upright on the other.

CLICK: Integrating Causal Inference and Commonsense Knowledge Incorporation for Counterfactual Story Generation

Counterfactual reasoning explores what could have happened if the circumstances were different from what actually occurred. As a crucial subtask, counterfactual story generation integrates counterfactual reasoning into the generative narrative chain, which requires the model to preserve minimal edits and ensure narrative consistency. Previous work prioritizes conflict detection as a first step, and then replaces conflicting content with appropriate words. However, these methods mainly face two challenging issues: (a) the causal relationship between story event sequences is not fully utilized in the conflict detection stage, leading to inaccurate conflict detection, and (b) the absence of proper planning in the content rewriting stage results in a lack of narrative consistency in the generated story ending. In this paper, we propose a novel counterfactual generation framework called CLICK based on causal inference in event sequences and commonsense knowledge incorporation. To address the first issue, we utilize the correlation between adjacent events in the story ending to iteratively calculate the contents from the original ending affected by the condition. The content with the original condition is then effectively prevented from carrying over into the new story ending, thereby avoiding causal conflict with the counterfactual conditions. Considering the second issue, we incorporate structural commonsense knowledge about counterfactual conditions, equipping the framework with comprehensive background information on the potential occurrence of counterfactual conditional events. Through leveraging a rich hierarchical data structure, CLICK gains the ability to establish a more coherent and plausible narrative trajectory for subsequent storytelling. Experimental results show that our model outperforms previous unsupervised state-of-the-art methods and achieves gains of 2.65 in BLEU, 4.42 in ENTScore, and 3.84 in HMean on the TIMETRAVEL dataset.

Scoping out the past: meniscus examination with arthroscopy; the light arrived in the knee before the end of World War I with the cystoscope, Fresnel's lens, and Edison's lamp.

Before radiology and arthroscopy, an arthrotomy had to be made for a definitive diagnosis and treat intraarticular pathology. Before arthroscopy, endoscopy was performed on other organs, and particularly the bladder. This paper aimed to investigate the transition of the cystoscope to the arthroscope, and all the bright innovations about light and optics that finally allow arthroscopy. Physicians have always wanted to examine their patients' body cavities. Some cavities are quite accessible for diagnostic purposes, using specula and light, while others are difficult to inspect. The female bladder was the first organ to be examined using an endoscope with some light by Philipp Bozzini in 1806. We report the important innovations and inventions done by surgeons but also by scientists in optic and electricity during two centuries before arriving to arthroscopy. Whereas the urologists immediately embraced the idea of endoscopy, and adapted the rules of optic and the progress in electricity to allow bladder illumination and examination with cystoscopes, the orthopedic surgeons were reluctant. We focus on the early history of endoscopy and arthroscopy specifically. Our story ends in 1918 with Dr. Severin Nordentoft in Germany and Professor Kenji Takagi in Japan began with cystoscopes before designing the first arthroscopes for performing the first knee arthroscopies. We document some crucial figures on the thorny path, from cystoscopy to adopting the arthroscope as a useful orthopaedic tool.

How Can Stories in Primary Education Support Sustainable Development in Bangladesh?

Stories are considered to be the most popular form of lore, which can facilitate the moral and ethical deliberation of sustainability for our children. It is evident that children respond better to stories than any other form of communication. Once the stories end, the lessons remain. The values tangled with the lesson transmit as they grow. Stories have always been instrumental and the most conventional way of teaching values by using illustrations from our lives. The major aim of this paper is to explore the values expressed in Bengali childlore through stories and tales and develop a framework by using a scaffolding and mapping approach. This framework attempts to analyse two commonly recognised stories, namely “Shukhu and Dukhu” and “Jackal, The Judge”, by scaffolding them with the generally acknowledged principles of sustainability and mapping them to investigate how stories can influence children to build a pro-sustainability attitude. This approach has been chosen, as recent research already points out the issues in implementing sustainability in education, but no one has yet found the way forward. The premise at the core of this theoretical article is that an interdisciplinary approach and different pedagogical tools could help build the bridge towards implementing sustainability in education as well as in society.

Loss of identity in nineteenth‐century Norway: Oslo's House of Correction

AbstractIn Norway, there was considerable overlap between the poor house, the workhouse, and correctional facilities. An assemblage of human skeletal remains from Oslo's House of Correction cemetery, largely comprised of individuals disturbed during municipal development in 1989, consists of c. 314 individuals who died as inmates or residents; many were disabled or elderly. Although names were recorded at death, the cemetery lacked grave markers or a map, with no expectation families might one day reclaim relatives. All remains have been aged and sexed anthropologically, with samples collected for biomolecular investigations. Despite extensive archival documentation, including names recorded in the House of Correction church book, their identities are shrouded by time. Observations of age, injury, and disease can suggest why inmates ended up in the House of Correction cemetery. But there, individual stories end and identities are lost.

Why do we engage (and keep engaging) in tragic and sad stories? Negativity bias and engagement in narratives eliciting negative feelings

ABSTRACT Our human tendency to remember more and pay more attention to negative events (rather than positive ones) may be at the core of our ‘enjoyment’ of the arts. Indeed, if we engage in sad and tragic stories, it may well be because we have a built-in propensity to be affected by situations eliciting negative emotions (i.e. a psychological phenomenon called the ‘Negativity Bias’). A good example of this seemingly paradoxical tendency is Fernando de Rojas’s Celestina (1499). Although the premise of the story is that of an amour courtois between two young lovers, Calisto and Melibea, the story ends with a suicide and, in between, there are also one murder, one accident leading to death and two executions. And yet, it was a bestseller at the time. This attraction to stories that elicit negative affects is also hypothesized to be the result of evolutionary pressures.

Investigating Responses to Narrative Cliffhangers Using Affective Disposition Theory

ABSTRACT Despite the prevalence of cliffhangers in popular narrative entertainment, little research has attempted to investigate the impact of these purportedly high-suspense, unresolved narrative endings on audience responses. Guided by affective disposition theory (ADT), in two between-subjects experiments (N Study 1 = 202; N Study 2 = 273) we investigated the extent to which audiences reported greater suspense, enjoyment, and desires for a future narrative installment in written narratives ending in a cliffhanger compared to narratives ending in a protagonist or antagonist victory. Results revealed (1) cliffhanger audiences desired a future story installment more than audiences who read a story ending featuring a protagonist victory (both studies) and antagonist victory (Study 2), and (2) no significant differences in audiences’ enjoyment or suspense for those who read a story ending in a cliffhanger compared to those who read an ending featuring either resolution. These findings suggest that cliffhangers may serve as a useful narrative device for maximizing audience retention throughout a series without necessarily sacrificing viewers’ enjoyment of the narrative. Results are discussed in terms of their theoretical implications for understanding cliffhangers as a disruption in the story evaluation process outlined by ADT. Practical implications for writers who may consider adopting cliffhangers in their narratives are also discussed.