ArticleSocial cognitive and affective neuroscience2021
Becoming the King in the North: identification with fictional characters is associated with greater self-other neural overlap.
Article in Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed, 47 citations in OpenAlex.
- Narrative "twist" shifts within-individual neural representations of dissociable story features.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Cultural fiction as predictive-affective simulation: a neurocognitive model of male emotional regulation and gender violence prevention.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Social Decision Preferences for Close Others Are Embedded in Neural and Linguistic Representations.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- TV Series in Mainstream Media Depicting Autism and Self-Diagnosis of Autism in a General Population of Young Adults.Journal of autism and developmental disorders · 2025Article
- Healthcare student engagement with health-related content through Netflix mini-series: a qualitative study.BMC nursing · 2025Article
- Unveiling the neural mechanisms of supernatural fiction comprehension using fNIRS.NPJ science of learning · 2025Article
- Narrative 'twist' shifts within-individual neural representations of dissociable story features.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Dance and the Embodied Social Cognition of Mating: Carlos Saura's Tango in the Perspective of the Tie-Up Theory.Integrative psychological & behavioral science · 2025Article
- Heroes and villains: opposing narrative roles engage neural synchronization in the inferior frontal gyrus.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2024Article
- Time is of the essence: past selves are not prioritized even when selective discrimination costs are controlled for.Psychological research · 2023Article
- Mind-stimulating leisure activities: Prospective associations with health, wellbeing, and longevity.Frontiers in public health · 2023Article
- Integrating media content analysis, reception analysis, and media effects studies.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2023Review
- Interaction in acting training and its different manifestations in novice and professional actors.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Adult attachment and engagement with fictional characters.Journal of social and personal relationships · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
During narrative experiences, identification with a fictional character can alter one's attitudes and self-beliefs to be more similar to those of the character. The ventral medial prefrontal cortex (vMPFC) is a brain region that shows increased activity when introspecting about the self but also when thinking of close friends. Here, we test whether identification with fictional characters is associated with increased neural overlap between self and fictional others. Nineteen fans of the HBO series Game of Thrones performed trait evaluations for the self, 9 real-world friends and 9 fictional characters during functional neuroimaging. Overall, the participants showed a larger response in the vMPFC for self compared to friends and fictional others. However, among the participants higher in trait identification, we observed a greater neural overlap in the vMPFC between self and fictional characters. Moreover, the magnitude of this association was greater for the character that participants reported feeling closest to/liked the most as compared to those they felt least close to/liked the least. These results suggest that identification with fictional characters leads people to incorporate these characters into their self-concept: the greater the immersion into experiences of 'becoming' characters, the more accessing knowledge about characters resembles accessing knowledge about the self.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.