Buffering effect of fiction on negative emotions : engagement with negatively valenced fiction decreases the intensity of negative emotions

Funding: This work was supported by the Templeton Religion Trust, TRT0354.Previous research has investigated how the context of perception affects emotional response. This study investigated how engagement with perceived fictional content vs perceived everyday-life content affects the way people experience negative emotions. Four studies with an experimental design tested how engagement with perceived fictional content vs perceived everyday life content affects the intensity of negative emotional response to negative emotional content, the motivation to decrease negative emotions, and cognitive reappraisal. Participants were presented with negatively valenced images and were asked to imagine either that they were witnessing them, or that a bystander was witnessing them, or that they were viewing a movie including these scenes. After the manipulation, all participants observed a different set of negatively valenced images or a set of negatively valenced videos and reported their emotional response. We found that the intensity of negative emotions and motivation to decrease them was lower among participants in the fiction condition compared to participants in the everyday life condition. Although perspective-taking had a similar effect on negative emotions, fiction condition was more successful in decreasing negative emotions. This might indicate that fiction plays a buffering role in decreasing the negative emotions people experience when facing negative emotional content.Peer reviewe

Cross-modal associations between paintings and sounds : effects of embodiment

This work was supported by the Templeton Religion Trust (grant number TRT0354).The present study investigated cross-modal associations between a series of paintings and sounds. We studied the effects of sound congruency (congruent vs. non-congruent sounds) and embodiment (embodied vs. synthetic sounds) on the evaluation of abstract and figurative paintings. Participants evaluated figurative and abstract paintings paired with congruent and non-congruent embodied and synthetic sounds. They also evaluated the perceived meaningfulness of the paintings, aesthetic value and immersive experience of the paintings. Embodied sounds (sounds associated with bodily sensations, bodily movements and touch) were more strongly associated with figurative paintings, while synthetic sounds (non-embodied sounds) were more strongly associated with abstract paintings. Sound congruency increased the perceived meaningfulness, immersive experience and aesthetic value of paintings. Sound embodiment increased immersive experience of paintings.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

"I had the feeling that I was trapped" : a bedside qualitative study of cognitive and affective attitudes towards noninvasive ventilation in patients with acute respiratory failure

At the time of the study, Dr. Schmidt was supported by grants from the “Société de Réanimation de Langue Française”, “Fonds de Recherche en Santé Respiratoire”, “Collège des Enseignants de Réanimation Médicale”, and “Fonds d’Etudes et de Recherche du Corps Médical des Hôpitaux de Paris”.Background Noninvasive ventilation (NIV) is the application of mechanical ventilation through a mask. It is used to treat certain forms of acute respiratory failure in intensive care units (ICU). NIV has clinical benefits but can be anxiogenic for the patients. This study aimed at describing cognitive and affective attitudes toward NIV among patients experiencing NIV for the first time in the context of an ICU stay. Methods Semi-structured interviews were conducted in 10 patients during their ICU stay and soon after their first NIV experience. None of the patients had ever received NIV previously. Evaluative assertion analysis and thematic analysis were used to investigate cognitive and affective attitudes toward NIV before, during, and after the first NIV experience, as well as patient attitudes toward caregivers and relatives. Results Before their first NIV session, the cognitive attitudes of the patients were generally positive. They became less so and more ambiguous during and after NIV, as the patients discovered the actual barriers associated with NIV. Affective attitudes during NIV were more negative than affective attitudes before and after NIV, with reports of dyspnea, anxiety, fear, claustrophobic feelings, and reactivation of past traumatic experiences. The patients had more positive attitudes toward the presence of a caregiver during NIV, compared to the presence of a family member. Conclusion This study corroborates the possibly negative—or even traumatic—nature of the NIV experience, with emphasis on the role of affective attitudes. This is a rationale for evaluating the impact of NIV-targeted psychological interventions in ICU patients with acute respiratory failure.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Theory of mind increases aesthetic appreciation in visual arts

Theory of mind is a cognitive ability that enables us to understand mental states of others, important in real-life communications as well as in aesthetic cognition. The present research investigated whether understanding intentions and emotions is related to aesthetic appreciation. Study 1 tested whether there is a link between aesthetic appreciation of cinematic films and attempts to understand the intentions and emotions of the artists and the film characters. It showed that a self-reported understanding of emotions and intentions is positively associated with aesthetic appreciation. Studies 2 and 4 investigated a causal relationship between the attempt to understand emotions and an aesthetic appreciation of artistic photos. Study 3 investigated an actual understanding of emotions and aesthetic appreciation of movie shots. The results show that when people evaluate the emotional state of the characters, they aesthetically appreciate artistic photos more, compared to when they evaluate non-mental characteristics of these photos (age of the characters, the colour of the photos). Moreover, better understanding of another’s emotions is related to greater aesthetic appreciation.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Crossmodal associations between cinema with elements of comic and tragic and texture touch

Crossmodal associations are systematic links between a stimulus from one modality (e.g., color) and a stimulus from another modality (e.g., sound). The present study investigated crossmodal associations between cinema (a complex visual and auditory stimulus) and texture touch. Participants watched fragments of movies with comic and tragic elements. They also touched different textures (e.g., silk, fur, marble) and chose the textures that were most/least consistent with the films. We found systematic links between the films and the textures associated with them. Films with elements of tragedy were associated with granite, marble and glass, while films with elements of comedy were associated with glass pebbles, plasticine and a slime toy. Similar emotional and semantic evaluations of textures and films can partly explain these crossmodal associations. Significant correlations were found between the direct emotional evaluation of films and indirect evaluation through the cinema-haptic perception index for the following scales: dirty, disgusting, pleasant and happy

Crossmodal associations between cinema with elements of comic and tragic and texture touch

Crossmodal associations are systematic links between a stimulus from one modality (e.g., color) and a stimulus from another modality (e.g., sound). The present study investigated crossmodal associations between cinema (a complex visual and auditory stimulus) and texture touch. Participants watched fragments of movies with comic and tragic elements. They also touched different textures (e.g., silk, fur, marble) and chose the textures that were most/least consistent with the films. We found systematic links between the films and the textures associated with them. Films with elements of tragedy were associated with granite, marble and glass, while films with elements of comedy were associated with glass pebbles, plasticine and a slime toy. Similar emotional and semantic evaluations of textures and films can partly explain these crossmodal associations. Significant correlations were found between the direct emotional evaluation of films and indirect evaluation through the cinema-haptic perception index for the following scales: dirty, disgusting, pleasant and happy

Theory of mind increases aesthetic appreciation in visual arts

Theory of mind is a cognitive ability that enables us to understand mental states of others, important in real-life communications as well as in aesthetic cognition. The present research investigated whether understanding intentions and emotions is related to aesthetic appreciation. Study 1 tested whether there is a link between aesthetic appreciation of cinematic films and attempts to understand the intentions and emotions of the artists and the film characters. It showed that a self-reported understanding of emotions and intentions is positively associated with aesthetic appreciation. Studies 2 and 4 investigated a causal relationship between the attempt to understand emotions and an aesthetic appreciation of artistic photos. Study 3 investigated an actual understanding of emotions and aesthetic appreciation of movie shots. The results show that when people evaluate the emotional state of the characters, they aesthetically appreciate artistic photos more, compared to when they evaluate non-mental characteristics of these photos (age of the characters, the colour of the photos). Moreover, better understanding of another’s emotions is related to greater aesthetic appreciation

Emotions associated with different textures during touch

Haptics plays an important role in emotion perception. However, most studies of the affective aspects of haptics have investigated emotional valence rather than emotional categories. In the present study, we explored the associations of different textures with six basic emotions: fear, anger, happiness, disgust, sadness and surprise. Participants touched twenty-one different textures and evaluated them using six emotional scales. Additionally, we explored whether individual differences in participants’ levels of alexithymia are related to the intensity of emotions associated with touching the textures. Alexithymia is a trait related to difficulties in identifying, describing and communicating emotions to others. The findings show that people associated touching different textures with distinct emotions. Textures associated with each of the basic emotions were identified. The study also revealed that a higher alexithymia level corresponds to a higher intensity of associations between textures and the emotions of disgust, anger and sadness

And Quiet Flows the Don:the Sholokhov-Kryukov authorship debate

‘And Quiet Flows the Don’ is an epic novel, considered one of the most significant works of Russian and world literature. The debate on the authorship of ‘And Quiet Flows the Don’ had been surrounding the novel since its first release in 1928 by Mikhail Sholokhov, who was repeatedly accused of plagiarism. The supporters of the plagiarism theory often indicate that the real author of the novel is the Cossack writer, Fyodor Kryukov, who died before ‘And Quiet Flows the Don’ was published. In the present study we applied the information-based similarity analysis (Yang et al., 2003a, Linguistic analysis of human heartbeats using frequency and rank order statistics. Physical Review Letters, 90: 108103; Yang et al., 2003b, Information categorization approach to literary authorship disputes. Physica A, 329, 473) and Burrows's Delta (Burrows, 2002, ‘Delta’: a measure of stylistic difference and a guide to likely authorship. Literary and Linguistic Computing, 17(3):267–87) to a corpus of Russian literature of XIX and XX centuries. We next used these two methods to compare ‘And Quiet Flows the Don’ to Sholokhov’s and Kryukov’s writings. It was found that Fyodor Kryukov writings are distinct from ‘And Quiet Flows the Don’, whilst Sholokhov’s writings being close to the Don novel. The results also highlight how both information similarity analysis and Delta analysis can be used Russian language

And Quiet Flows the Don:the Sholokhov-Kryukov authorship debate

‘And Quiet Flows the Don’ is an epic novel, considered one of the most significant works of Russian and world literature. The debate on the authorship of ‘And Quiet Flows the Don’ had been surrounding the novel since its first release in 1928 by Mikhail Sholokhov, who was repeatedly accused of plagiarism. The supporters of the plagiarism theory often indicate that the real author of the novel is the Cossack writer, Fyodor Kryukov, who died before ‘And Quiet Flows the Don’ was published. In the present study we applied the information-based similarity analysis (Yang et al., 2003a, Linguistic analysis of human heartbeats using frequency and rank order statistics. Physical Review Letters, 90: 108103; Yang et al., 2003b, Information categorization approach to literary authorship disputes. Physica A, 329, 473) and Burrows's Delta (Burrows, 2002, ‘Delta’: a measure of stylistic difference and a guide to likely authorship. Literary and Linguistic Computing, 17(3):267–87) to a corpus of Russian literature of XIX and XX centuries. We next used these two methods to compare ‘And Quiet Flows the Don’ to Sholokhov’s and Kryukov’s writings. It was found that Fyodor Kryukov writings are distinct from ‘And Quiet Flows the Don’, whilst Sholokhov’s writings being close to the Don novel. The results also highlight how both information similarity analysis and Delta analysis can be used Russian language