ArticleCommunications biology2021
Aesthetic appraisals of literary style and emotional intensity in narrative engagement are neurally dissociable.
Article in Communications biology, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Literary literacy and mental health in contemporary China: evidence from the China family panel studies.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Predicting subjective ratings of affect and comprehensibility with text features: a reader response study of narrative poetry.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Approximate Entropy in Canonical and Non-Canonical Fiction.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
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5 authors.
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Abstract
Humans are deeply affected by stories, yet it is unclear how. In this study, we explored two aspects of aesthetic experiences during narrative engagement - literariness and narrative fluctuations in appraised emotional intensity. Independent ratings of literariness and emotional intensity of two literary stories were used to predict blood-oxygen-level-dependent signal changes in 52 listeners from an existing fMRI dataset. Literariness was associated with increased activation in brain areas linked to semantic integration (left angular gyrus, supramarginal gyrus, and precuneus), and decreased activation in bilateral middle temporal cortices, associated with semantic representations and word memory. Emotional intensity correlated with decreased activation in a bilateral frontoparietal network that is often associated with controlled attention. Our results confirm a neural dissociation in processing literary form and emotional content in stories and generate new questions about the function of and interaction between attention, social cognition, and semantic systems during literary engagement and aesthetic experiences.
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