Fiction feelings in Harry Potter

Abstract

Immersion in reading, described as a feeling of 'getting lost in a book', is a ubiquitous phenomenon widely appreciated by readers. However, it has been largely ignored in cognitive neuroscience. According to the fiction feeling hypothesis, narratives with emotional contents invite readers more to be empathic with the protagonists and thus engage the affective empathy network of the brain, the anterior insula and mid-cingulate cortex, than do stories with neutral contents. To test the hypothesis, we presented participants with text passages from the Harry Potter series in a functional MRI experiment and collected post-hoc immersion ratings, comparing the neural correlates of passage mean immersion ratings when reading fear-inducing versus neutral contents. Results for the conjunction contrast of baseline brain activity of reading irrespective of emotional content against baseline were in line with previous studies on text comprehension. In line with the fiction feeling hypothesis, immersion ratings were significantly higher for fear-inducing than for neutral passages, and activity in the mid-cingulate cortex correlated more strongly with immersion ratings of fear-inducing than of neutral passages. Descriptions of protagonists' pain or personal distress featured in the fear-inducing passages apparently caused increasing involvement of the core structure of pain and affective empathy the more readers immersed in the text. The predominant locus of effects in the mid-cingulate cortex seems to reflect that the immersive experience was particularly facilitated by the motor component of affective empathy for our stimuli from the Harry Potter series featuring particularly vivid descriptions of the behavioural aspects of emotion.

The Neural Mechanisms of Meditative Practices: Novel Approaches for Healthy Aging

“…The MCC is particularly interesting in the context of mindfulness meditation as it has been conceptualized as integrating emotionally salient interoceptive information that may ultimately result in improved movement–balance activity [56]. One study showed that the MCC was activated when subjects read emotionally evocative (versus neutral) stories and that its activation was correlated with self-reported feelings of “immersion” while reading [57]. Yet, other studies have shown the MCC’s involvement in environmental monitoring, response selection, and motor body orientation [58].…”

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“…So far, immersion appears the only process that has been examined with neurocognitive methods. For example, in an fMRI study on immersive experiences taking place while reading emotion-laden versus neutral passages of Harry Potter, the emotion-laden passages resulted in stronger correlations between blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) signals in neural substrates associated with empathy on the one hand and post hoc immersion ratings on the other (Hsu et al, 2014). …”

On Elementary Affective Decisions: To Like Or Not to Like, That Is the Question

“…Other metaphors than Balázs’ are popular in the literature, e.g., absorption or transportation, but at present both the conceptual work and empirical data base is not enough developed to allow sharp distinctions (Jacobs and Schrott, 2015; Jacobs and Lüdtke, in press). What seems clear is that young and adult readers long for immersion into novels like Harry Potter and a few pioneering studies have begun to investigate the neurocognitive and –affective underpinnings of this phenomenon (Hsu et al, 2014; Lüdtke et al, 2014). It is less clear whether readers’ longing for poetry like Shakespeare’s or Pushkin’s, as well as highly foregrounded narratives from Joyce or Proust is based on the same kind of neuropsychological processes or linked more to processes of aesthetic appreciation, as proposed by the Neurocognitive Poetics Model (NCPM; Jacobs, 2011, 2015a, 2016b; cf.…”

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