Aesthetic Appreciation of Joyful and Sad Poems

Artworks with sad and affectively negative content have repeatedly been reported to elicit positive aesthetic appreciation. This topic has received much attention both in the history of poetics and aesthetics as well as in recent studies on sad films and sad music. However, poetry and aesthetic evaluations of joyful and sad poetry have received only little attention in empirical studies to date. We collected beauty and liking ratings for 24 sad and 24 joyful poems from 128 participants. Following previous studies, we computed an integrated measure for overall aesthetic appreciation based on the beauty and liking ratings to test for differences in appreciation between joyful and sad poems. Further, we tested whether readers’ responses are related to their affinity for poetry. Results show that sad poems are rated significantly higher for aesthetic appreciation than joyful poems, and that aesthetic appreciation is influenced by the participants’ affinity for poetry

Who reads contemporary erotic novels and why?

In the wake of EL James’s series Fifty Shades of Grey, the book market has seen a veritable surge of bestselling erotic novels over the past decade. The online study reported here pursued two questions: (1) Who reads these erotic novels? (2) What are the reasons underlying this preference? Most of the readers of erotic novels that responded to our survey are heterosexual women in committed relationships. They are highly educated, from a broad age span, describe themselves as avid readers and like to share their reading experiences with others. Distraction and feelings of ease were identified as prime rewards associated with reading erotic novels. The sexual explicitness of the novels and their potential to provide guidance in life also play a role, yet turned out to be less important than suggested in previous research. Contrary to critical opinion, our participants consider erotic novels––at least to a certain degree–to be emancipated, feminist, and progressive. We relate this finding primarily to the surveyed participants’ rather traditional beliefs regarding gender roles. Our study is the first to explore empirically the readership and the reading rewards underlying a current large-scale cultural phenomenon, emphasizing the need for future investigations off the literary canon

On the Relation between the General Affective Meaning and the Basic Sublexical, Lexical, and Inter-lexical Features of Poetic Texts - A Case Study Using 57 Poems of H. M. Enzensberger

The literary genre of poetry is inherently related to the expression and elicitation of emotion via both content and form. To explore the nature of this affective impact at an extremely basic textual level, we collected ratings on eight different general affective meaning scales—valence, arousal, friendliness, sadness, spitefulness, poeticity, onomatopoeia, and liking—for 57 German poems (“die verteidigung der wölfe”) which the contemporary author H. M. Enzensberger had labeled as either “friendly,” “sad,” or “spiteful.” Following Jakobson's (1960) view on the vivid interplay of hierarchical text levels, we used multiple regression analyses to explore the specific influences of affective features from three different text levels (sublexical, lexical, and inter-lexical) on the perceived general affective meaning of the poems using three types of predictors: (1) Lexical predictor variables capturing the mean valence and arousal potential of words; (2) Inter-lexical predictors quantifying peaks, ranges, and dynamic changes within the lexical affective content; (3) Sublexical measures of basic affective tone according to sound-meaning correspondences at the sublexical level (see Aryani et al., 2016). We find the lexical predictors to account for a major amount of up to 50% of the variance in affective ratings. Moreover, inter-lexical and sublexical predictors account for a large portion of additional variance in the perceived general affective meaning. Together, the affective properties of all used textual features account for 43–70% of the variance in the affective ratings and still for 23–48% of the variance in the more abstract aesthetic ratings. In sum, our approach represents a novel method that successfully relates a prominent part of variance in perceived general affective meaning in this corpus of German poems to quantitative estimates of affective properties of textual components at the sublexical, lexical, and inter-lexical level

Computer simulation of pulsed field gel runs allows the quantitation of radiation-induced double-strand breaks in yeast

A procedure for the quantification of double-strand breaks in yeast is presented that utilizes pulsed field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) and a comparison of the observed DNA mass distribution in the gel lanes with calculated distributions. Calculation of profiles is performed as follows. If double-strand breaks are produced by sparsely ionizing radiation, one can assume that they are distributed randomly in the genome, and the resulting DNA mass distribution in molecular length can be predicted by means of a random breakage model. The input data for the computation of molecular length profiles are the breakage frequency per unit length, , as adjustable parameter, and the molecular lengths of the intact chromosomes. The obtained DNA mass distributions in molecular length must then be transformed into distributions of DNA mass in migration distance. This requires a calibration of molecular length vs. migration distance that is specific for the gel lane in question. The computed profiles are then folded with a Lorentz distribution with adjusted spread parameter to account for and broadening. The DNA profiles are calculated for different breakage frequencies and for different values of , and the parameters resulting in the best fit of the calculated to the observed profile are determined

Characterization of the yehUT Two-Component Regulatory System of Salmonella enterica Serovar Typhi and Typhimurium

10.1371/journal.pone.0084567PLoS ONE812-POLN

Zum Stil einer digital geprägten Leserealität: Eine Untersuchung der Fifty Shades of Grey-Trilogie mittels Dargestelltem und Darstellung

Der vorliegende Beitrag setzt sich mit der Trilogie Fifty Shades of Grey von EL James auseinander, die aufgrund ihres großen internationalen Erfolgs ein Beispiel für ein massenphänomenales Leseereignis zu Beginn des einundzwanzigsten Jahrhunderts darstellt. Ziel der vorrangig deskriptiven Auseinandersetzung, die durch ein Interview mit der deutschen Lektorin der Trilogie ergänzt wird, ist ein besseres Verständnis dieser Leserealität, die insbesondere durch eine Beschreibung des Stils von Fifty Shades of Grey in ihrer Funktionalität und potentiellen Wirkung auf die LeserInnen erklärbar wird. Hierbei wird Fifty Shades of Grey auch vor dem Hintergrund des beteiligten Sozialsystems Literatur diskutiert um aufzuzeigen, wie und in welchem Ausmaß die Trilogie, beziehungsweise deren Entstehung und Verbreitung, von digitalen Aspekten bestimmt und beeinflusst ist. In einem ersten Schritt werden hierfür die relevanten Eigenschaften des Dargestellten und der Darstellung der Texte identifiziert. In einem zweiten Schritt dienen diese Merkmalsbeschreibungen in der Synthese einer Stilbeschreibung von Fifty Shades of Grey. Zusammenfassend kann dieser Stil als überaus emotional sowie von großem Affizierungspotential für die LeserInnen beschrieben werden und scheint auf einen Lustgewinn durch verschiedene Begehrlichkeiten der Trilogie angelegt. Der Beitrag endet mit einem Ausblick auf zukünftige Untersuchungen populärer und polarisierender Leserealitäten, welche vor dem Hintergrund des beginnenden einundzwanzigsten Jahrhunderts besonders relevant erscheinen

Emotional effects of poetic phonology, word positioning and dominant stress peaks in poetry reading

This study tested the hypothesis that features of linguistically non-mandatory phonological recurrence (rhyme, alliteration, assonance, and consonance), parameters of word positioning (position within a line and line position) and dominant stress peaks are related to readers’ identification of distinctively joyful and sad words in poetry. To this end, forty-eight participants read eight German poems, completed an underlining task, and filled out a brief questionnaire. Results show that these target features are clearly of importance for readers’ perception of pronounced levels of joy and sadness. Words featuring alliteration, assonance or consonance were significantly more often underlined as distinctively joyful than were words that lack these features. Our study shows also that words that feature a dominant stress peak and are placed in more advanced positions within the poems were more likely to be identified as emotional (distinctively joyful and sad) when compared to words in earlier and unstressed positions