Empathic Embarrassment Responses While Viewing Romantic-Rejection and General Embarrassment Situations

Empathic embarrassment occurs when an observer experiences embarrassment while viewing another person in an embarrassing situation. It was hypothesized that the type of embarrassment situation, the prior information provided about an embarrassed protagonist, perceived similarity to an embarrassed protagonist, ability to relate to an embarrassed protagonist, and embarrassability would influence empathic embarrassment responses. Participants (N = 208) either read a vignette containing general or specific information about a female embarrassed protagonist or received no prior information about her. They watched an embarrassment situation (romantic-rejection or general) featuring this protagonist and reported their empathic embarrassment responses. They then rated how similar they felt to the protagonist and how able they were to relate to her. Their embarrassability was also assessed. It was found that the general embarrassment situation evoked stronger empathic embarrassment responses than the romantic-rejection embarrassment situation. Further, the amount of prior information did not influence empathic embarrassment responses overall. High perceived similarity, high ability to relate, and high embarrassability all led to stronger empathic embarrassment responses for the romantic-rejection embarrassment situation. For the general embarrassment situation, however, these variables did not influence empathic embarrassment responses. Moreover, when embarrassability was taken into account, the difference in the empathic embarrassment responses between the embarrassment situations disappeared

The body in the library: adventures in realism

This essay looks at two aspects of the virtual ‘material world’ of realist fiction: objects encountered by the protagonist and the latter’s body. Taking from Sartre two angles on the realist pact by which readers agree to lend their bodies, feelings, and experiences to the otherwise ‘languishing signs’ of the text, it goes on to examine two sets of first-person fictions published between 1902 and 1956 — first, four modernist texts in which banal objects defy and then gratify the protagonist, who ends up ready and almost able to write; and, second, three novels in which the body of the protagonist is indeterminate in its sex, gender, or sexuality. In each of these cases, how do we as readers make texts work for us as ‘an adventure of the body’

BOOK REVIEW OF LOOKING FOR ALASKA WRITTEN BY JOHN GREEN

Main purpose of this review is to encourage readers to read Looking for Alaska and to understand the motive of the protagonist of this novel. This review contains some major spoilers from this novel. Looking for Alaska tells about changes and experiences which encountered by the protagonist while seeking his Great Perhaps. The novel also conveys what it means to love and to lose someone. After reading this review, the readers could understand this novel clearly and thoroughly

Myth Protagonist X

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A Puzzle about Further Facts

In metaphysics, there are a number of distinct but related questions about the existence of "further facts" -- facts that are contingent relative to the physical structure of the universe. These include further facts about qualia, personal identity, and time. In this article I provide a sequence of examples involving computer simulations, ranging from one in which the protagonist can clearly conclude such further facts exist to one that describes our own condition. This raises the question of where along the sequence (if at all) the protagonist stops being able to soundly conclude that further facts exist.Comment: To appear in Erkenntnis: An International Journal of Scientific Philosoph

In Our Shoes or the Protagonist’s? Knowledge, Justification, and Projection

Sackris and Beebe (2014) report the results of a series of studies that seem to show that there are cases in which many people are willing to attribute knowledge to a protagonist even when her belief is unjustified. These results provide some reason to conclude that the folk concept of knowledge does not treat justification as necessary for its deployment. In this paper, we report a series of results that can be seen as supporting this conclusion by going some way towards ruling out an alternative account of Sackris and Beebe’s results—the possibility that the knowledge attributions that they witnessed largely stem from protagonist projection, a phenomenon in language use and interpretation in which the speaker uses words that the relevant protagonist might use to describe her own situation and the listener interprets the speaker accordingly. With that said, we do caution the reader against drawing the conclusion too strongly, on the basis of results like those reported here and by Sackris and Beebe. There are alternative possibilities regarding what drives the observed knowledge attributions in cases of unjustified true belief that must be ruled out before, on the basis of such results, we can conclude with much confidence that the folk concept of knowledge does not treat justification as necessary for its deployment

"Never the twain shall meet?" East and West in the characterization of Conchobar mac Nessa

This is a study of some contradictory depictions of a key protagonist within the Ulster Cycle, Conchobar mac Nessa, which attempts to further an understanding of the concept of characterization within medieval Irish literature