Dec 1st Journal Club

Themes: narrative, reading, social cognition, empathy, loneliness, gratitude journaling, transitory periods

Presenters: YK (Yoon Kyung Lee), EL (Eunji Lee)

Topic 1: Reading Narrative Stories and Empathy [YK]

선정 이유

서사가 담긴 이야기(narrative stories; narratives)또는 책을 읽는 것과 공감 능력의 관계에 대한 지난 몇 년간의 연구 결과와 향후 연구 방향에 대한 제언이 담긴 리뷰 논문이라 선정함

내용 요약

Open questions and challenges

• What text characteristics drive the social-cognitive potential of narratives?
  • literary fiction to the effect of reading a piece of popular fiction (Kidd & Castano, 2013; 2018; Pino & Mazza, 2016; van Kuijk et al., 2018) => criticism
  • specific narrative style (foregrounding, metaphors, aliterations, ellipses, etc.) 
  • formal narrative characteristics such as the representation of the inner world of protagonists
    • linguistic items that signal high levels of reflection (e.g., “think”, “but”) as opposed to low levels of reflection (e.g., “me”, “can”)
    • empathy for Arab Muslims = higher after reading a full narrative that included dialogues and monologues than after reading a condensed form of the same narrative
  • other forms of texts:
    • biographies, memoirs, and literary journalism (van Krieken, 2019)
• What type of readers is susceptible to these effects?
  • issues: mainly focus on simple demographic characteristics (age, gender), trait empathy, reading amount
    • other individual differences: 
      • openness (Djikic et al., 2013), attachment style (Djikic et al., 2009), low transportability as a moderator between narrative exposure and empathetic concern (Lenhart et al., 2020), adults with specific conditions (e.g., ASD), adults with training (e.g., role-play activities; Bas-Sarmiento et al., 2020), occupation (e.g., Teding van Berkhout & Malouff, 2016; Weisz et al., 2021), verbal and reading abilities (higher print exposure scores find it easier to emotionally engage with story characters (Koopman, 2015; 2016; van Lissa et al., 2018), personal experience with the topic of a narrative => more prosocial behavior/empathetic understanding, depression experience, report more vivid imagery with personal experiences, personal preferences (De Mulder et al., 2021; Djikic et al., 2012; Panero et al., 2016)
• Which aspects of social cognition are influenced by narrative reading?
  • challenges: how specific, quantifiable SC abilities are affected by exposure to the narrative? 
    • other related behaviors: prosocial behavior (Johnson, 2012; Koopman, 2015), emotional contagion, emotion recognition, emotion regulation, social memory, social schemas, facial recognition, or understanding of the self (Mar 2018)
      • high level of affective empathy for the main protagonists => twice as likely to help the experimenter pick up dropped pens
      • reduce prejudice and stereotyping (Hakemulder, 2000; Johnson, 2012, 2013; Johnson et al., 2013a,b; Koopman, 2015; Vezzali et al., 2015;
• recent approaches using media:
  • popular media (Black & Barnes, 2015a, 2019; Mar et al., 2010; Nathanson et al., 2013)
  • timeline of the effects of narrative exposure (Bal & Veltkamp, 2013)
  • effects of writing rather than reading narratives (Kou et al., 2020; Maciej et al., 2017)

의의

• suggestions for future research:
  • the text characteristics that drive narrative effects of social cognition
  • individual differences approach
  • develop more specific measures beyond empathy and ToM
    • prosocial behavior

참고 문헌

Eekhof, L.S., van Krieken, K. & Willems, R.M. (2022). Reading about minds: The social-cognitive potential of narratives. Psychon Bull Rev 29, 1703–1718. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-022-02079-z

Topic 2: TY: Facilitating social engagement to mitigate loneliness during transitory periods