The Function of Fiction is the Abstraction and Simulation of Social Experience
Abstract
Fiction literature has largely been ignored by psychology researchers because its only function seems to be entertainment, with no connection to empirical validity. We argue that literary narratives have a more important purpose. They offer models or simulations of the social world via abstraction, simplification, and compression. Narrative fiction also creates a deep and immersive simulative experience of social interactions for readers. This simulation facilitates the communication and understanding of social information and makes it more compelling, achieving a form of learning through experience. Engaging in the simulative experiences of fiction literature can facilitate the understanding of others who are different from ourselves and can augment our capacity for empathy and social inference.
Get full access to this article
View all access and purchase options for this article.
References
Abell G., Happé F., Frith U. (2000). Do triangles play tricks? Attribution of mental states to animated shapes in normal and abnormal development. Cognitive Development, 15, 1–16.
Abrams M.H. (1953). The mirror and the lamp: Romantic theory and the critical tradition. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
Alba J.W., Hasher L. (1983). Is memory schematic. Psychological Bulletin, 93, 203–231.
Alexander K.J., Miller P.J., Hengst J.A. (2001). Young children's emotional attachments to stories. Social Development, 10, 374–398.
Arbib M.A., Billard A., Iacoboni M., Oztop E. (2000). Synthetic brain imaging: Grasping, mirror neurons and imitation. Neural Networks, 13, 975–997.
Aristotle (1987). Poetics (R. Janko, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Hackett. (Originally published 330 BCE)
Bar-Haim Y., Fox N.A., VanMeenen K.M., Marshall P.J. (2004). Children's narratives and patterns of cardiac reactivity. Developmental Psychobiology, 44, 238–249.
Barsalou L.W. (1999). Perceptual symbol systems. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22, 577–660.
Barsalou L.W. (2003). Situated simulation in the human conceptual system. Language and Cognitive Processes, 18, 513–562.
Bartlett F.C. (1932). Remembering: A study in experimental and social psychology. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Black J.B., Turner T.J., Bower G.H. (1979). Point of view in narrative comprehension, memory, and production. Journal of Verbal Learning & Verbal Behaviour, 18, 187–198.
Blakemore S., Decety J. (2001). From the perception of action to the understanding of intention. Nature Reviews. Neuroscience, 2, 561–567.
Bluck S., Habermas T. (2001). Extending the study of autobiographical memory: Thinking back about life across the life span. Review of General Psychology, 5, 135–147.
Booth W.C. (1988). The company we keep: An ethics of fiction. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Brockmeier J., Carbaugh D. (Eds.). (2001). Narrative and identity: Studies in autobiography, self, and culture. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Bruner J. (1986). Actual minds, possible worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bruner J. (2003). The narrative construction of reality. In Mateas M., Sengers P. (Eds.), Narrative intelligence: Advances in consciousness research (Vol. 46, pp. 41–62). Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Carroll J. (1999). The deep structure of literary representations. Evolution and Human Behavior, 20, 159–173.
Carruthers P., Smith P.K. (Eds.). (1996). Theories of theories of mind. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Castelli F., Frith C.D., Happé F., Frith U. (2002). Autism, Asperger syndrome, and brain mechanisms for the attribution of mental states to animated shapes. Brain, 125, 1839–1849.
Castelli F., Happé F., Frith U., Frith C.D. (2000). Movement and mind: A functional imaging study of perception and interpretation of complex intentional movement patterns. NeuroImage, 12, 314–325.
Clifton C. Jr., Duffy S.A. (2001). Sentence and text comprehension: Roles of linguistic structure. Annual Review of Psychology, 52, 167–196.
Cortesi M. Producer, Bertolucci B. (Director). (1998). Besieged [Motion picture]. United States: Fine Line Features.
Cupchik G.C., Hilscher M. (2004). Personal life-narratives in an evolutionary context. Journal of Cultural and Evolutionary Psychology, 2, 321–336.
Dal Cin S., Zanna M.P., Fong G.T. (2004). Narrative persuasion and overcoming resistance. In Knowles E.S., Linn J.A. (Eds.), Resistance and persuasion (pp. 175–191). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Dawson G., Toth K., Abbot R., Osterling J., Munson J., Estes A., Liaw J. (2004). Early social attention impairments in autism: Social orienting, joint attention, and attention to distress. Developmental Psychology, 40, 271–283.
Dennet D. (1987). The intentional stance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Dickens C. (1985). Hard times. London: Penguin. (Original work published 1854)
Diekman A.B., McDonald M., Gardner W.L. (2000). Love means never having to be careful: The relationship between reading romance novels and safe sex behavior. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 24, 179–188.
Donaldson M. (1978). Children's minds. London: Fontana.
Dunbar R.I.M. (2004a). Gossip in evolutionary perspective. Review of General Psychology, 8, 100–110.
Dunbar R.I.M. (2004b). The human story: A new history of mankind's evolution. London: Faber.
Eisenberg N. (2000). Empathy and sympathy. In Lewis M., Haviland-Jones J.M. (Eds.), Handbook of emotions (2nd ed., pp. 677–691). New York: Guilford.
Eliot G. (1883). The natural history of German life: Riehl. In The works of George Eliot. Standard Edition: Essays (pp. 188–236). Edinburgh: Blackwood. (Original work published 1856)
Elster J. (1999). Alchemies of the mind: Rationality and the emotions. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Eng A. (2002). Learning and processing non-fiction genre. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Fivush R., Haden C.A. (Eds.). (2003). Autobiographical memory and the construction of a narrative self: Developmental and cultural perspectives. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Frith C.D., Frith U. (1999). Interacting minds: A biological basis. Science, 286, 1692–1695.
Frith U., Frith C.D. (2001). The biological basis of social interaction. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 10, 151–155.
Frith U., Frith C.D. (2003). Development and neurophysiology of mentalizing. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London: Series B. Biological Sciences, 358, 459–473.
Galinsky A.D., Moskowitz G.B. (2000). Perspective-taking: Decreasing stereotype expression, stereotype accessibility, and in-group favoritism. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78, 708–724.
Gallese V., Ferrari P., Kohler E., Fogassi L. (2002). The eyes, the hand, and the mind: Behavioral and neurophysiological aspects of social cognition. In Bekoff M., Allen C., Burghardt G.M. (Eds.), The cognitive animal: Empirical and theoretical perspectives on animal cognition (pp. 451–461). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gallese V., Goldman A. (1998). Mirror neurons and the simulation theory of mind-reading. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2, 493–501.
Gallese V., Keysers C., Rizzolatti G. (2004). A unifying view of the basis of social cognition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8, 396–403.
Gerardin E., Sirigu A., Lehéricy S., Poline J., Gaymard B., Marsault C., et al. (2000). Partially overlapping neural networks for real and imagined hand movements. Cerebral Cortex, 10, 1093–1104.
Gernsbacher M.A. (1997). Two decades of structure building. Discourse Processes, 23, 265–304.
Gerrig R.J. (1993). Experiencing narrative worlds. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Gerrig R.J., O'Brien E.J. (2005). The scope of memory-based processing. Discourse Processes, 39, 225–242.
Glenberg A.M., Meyer M., Lindem K. (1987). Mental models contribute to foregrounding during text comprehension. Journal of Memory and Language, 26, 69–83.
Glucksberg S. (2003). The psycholinguistics of metaphor. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7, 92–96.
Goebel R., Khorram-Sefat D., Muckli L., Hacker H., Singer W. (1998). The constructive nature of vision: Direct evidence from functional magnetic resonance imaging studies of apparent motion and motion imagery. European Journal of Neuroscience, 10, 1563–1573.
Graesser A.C., Hauft-Smith K., Cohen A.D., Pyles L.D. (1980). Advanced outlines, familiarity, and text genre on retention of prose. Journal of Experimental Education, 48, 281–290.
Graesser A.C., Millis K.K., Zwaan R.A. (1997). Discourse comprehension. Annual Review of Psychology, 48, 163–189.
Graesser A.C., Singer M., Trabasso T. (1994). Constructing inferences during narrative text comprehension. Psychological Review, 101, 371–395.
Green M.C. (2004). Transportation into narrative worlds: The role of prior knowledge and perceived realism. Discourse Processes, 38, 247–266.
Green M.C., Brock T.C. (2000). The role of transportation in the persuasiveness of public narratives. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79, 701–721.
Green M.C., Strange J.J., Brock T.C. (Eds.). (2002). Narrative impact: Social and cognitive foundations. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Greenberg M.A., Wortman C.B., Stone A.A. (1996). Emotional expression and physical health: Revising traumatic memories or fostering self-regulation? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71, 588–602.
Grossman E.D., Blake R. (2001). Brain activity evoked by inverted and imagined biological motion. Vision Research, 41, 1475–1482.
Habermas T., Bluck S. (2000). Getting a life: The emergence of the life story in adolescence. Psychological Bulletin, 126, 748–769.
Haden C.A., Haine R.A., Fivush R. (1997). Developing narrative structure in parent–child reminiscing across the preschool years. Developmental Psychology, 33, 295–307.
Hakemulder F. (2000). The moral laboratory: Experiments examining the effects of reading literature on social perception and moral self-concept. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Halasz L., Short M., Varga A. (2002). A cross-cultural study of fictional and non-fictional text understanding. Poetics, 30, 195–219.
Harris P.L. (2000). The work of the imagination. Oxford, United Kingdom: Blackwell.
Harris R.J. (2004). A cognitive psychology of mass communication (4th ed.). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Heider F., Simmel M. (1944). An experimental study of apparent behavior. American Journal of Psychology, 57, 243–259.
Hodgins J. (1993). A passion for narrative: A guide for writing fiction. Toronto, Ontario, Canada: McClelland & Stewart.
Hogan P.C. (2003). The mind and its stories. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Iacoboni M. (2005). Neural mechanisms of imitation. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 15, 632–637.
Iacoboni M., Dapretto M. (2006). The mirror neuron system and the consequences of its dysfunction. Nature Reviews. Neuroscience, 7, 942–951.
Iacoboni M., Woods R.P., Brass M., Bekkering H., Mazziotta J.C., Rizzolatti G. (1999). Cortical mechanisms of human imitation. Science, 286, 2526–2528.
Ingalls D.H.H., Masson J.M., Patwardhan M.V. (1990). The Dhvanyaloka of Anandavardana with the Locana of Abhinavagupta. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
James H. (1951). The art of fiction. In Zabel M.D. (Ed.), The portable Henry James (pp. 391–418). New York: Viking. (Reprinted from Longman's Magazine, September 1884)
Johnson-Laird P.N. (1983). Mental models: Towards a cognitive science of language, inference, and consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Johnson-Laird P.N. (2006). How we reason. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
Kashima Y., Peters K., Whelan J. (in press). Culture, narrative, and human agency. In Sorrentino R., Yamaguchi S. (Eds.), Handbook of motivation and cognition across cultures. Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Katz P.A., Zalk S.R. (1978). Modification of children's racial attitudes. Developmental Psychology, 14, 447–461.
Keen S. (2006). A theory of narrative empathy. Narrative, 14, 207–236.
Kerr A.P. (2005). Towards a therapeutics of reading literature: The influence of aesthetic distance and attachment. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Kintsch W. (2005). An overview of top-down and bottom-up effects in comprehension: The CI perspective. Discourse Processes, 39, 125–128.
Kintsch W., van Dijk T. (1978). Toward a model of text comprehension and production. Psychological Review, 85, 363–394.
Klin A. (2000). Attributing social meaning to ambiguous visual stimuli in higher-functioning autism and Asperger syndrome: The social attribution task. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 41, 831–846.
Kosslyn S.M., Thompson W.L., Kim I.J., Alpert N.M. (1995). Topographical representations of mental images in primary visual cortex. Nature, 378, 496–498.
Kourtzi Z., Kanwisher N. (2000). Activation in human MT/MST by static images with implied motion. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 12, 48–55.
Kraemer D.J.M., Macrae C.N., Green A.E., Kelley W.M. (2005). Musical imagery: Sound of silence activates auditory cortex. Nature, 434, 158.
Kuiken D., Phillips L., Gregus M., Miall D.S., Verbitsky M., Tonkonogy A. (2004). Locating self-modifying feelings within literary reading. Discourse Processes, 38, 267–286.
Lamarque P. (2003). Fiction. In Levinson J. (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of aesthetics (pp. 377–391). Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
Lamarque P. (2004). On not expecting too much from narrative. Mind and Language, 19, 393–408.
Lamarque P. (2007). On the distance between literary narratives and real-life narratives. In Hutto D. (Ed.), Narrative and understanding persons: Royal Institute of Philosophy supplement (pp. 117–132). Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.
Larsen S.F., Seilman U. (1988). Personal meanings while reading literature. Text, 8, 411–429.
Lieberman M. (2007). Social cognitive neuroscience: A review of core processes. Annual Review of Psychology, 58, 259–289.
Lipps T. (1900). Ästhstische Einfühlung [Aesthetic empathy]. Zeitschrift für Psychologie, 22, 415–450.
Litcher J.H., Johnson D.W. (1969). Changes in attitudes toward Negroes of white elementary school students after use of multiethnic readers. Journal of Educational Psychology, 60, 148–152.
Lodge D. (1990). Narration with words. In Barlow H., Blakemore C., Weston-Smith M. (Eds.), Images and understanding: Thoughts about images, ideas about understanding (pp. 141–153). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Long S.A., Winograd P.N., Bridge C.A. (1989). The effects of reader and text characteristics on imagery reported during and after reading. Reading Research Quarterly, 24, 353–372.
Lubbock P. (1921). The craft of fiction. London: Cape.
Magai C., Haviland-Jones J. (2002). The hidden genius of emotion: Lifespan transformations of personality. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Magliano J.P., Dijkstra K., Zwaan R.A. (1996). Predictive inferences in movies. Discourse Processes, 22, 199–224.
Mandler J.M. (1984). Stories, scripts, & scenes: Aspects of schema theory. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Mar R.A. (2004). The neuropsychology of narrative: Story comprehension, story production and their interrelation. Neuropsychologia, 42, 1414–1434.
Mar R.A. (2007). Simulation-based theories of narrative comprehension: Evidence and implications. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Mar R.A., Kelley W.M., Heatherton T.F., Macrae C.N. (2007). Detecting agency from the biological motion of veridical versus animated agents. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2, 199–205.
Mar R.A., Macrae C.N. (2007). Triggering the intentional stance. In Bock G., Goode J. (Ed.), Empathy and fairness (pp. 110–119, Discussion: 119–132). Chichester, United Kingdom: John Wiley & Sons.
Mar R.A., Oatley K., Eng A. (2003, August). Abstraction and the vividness of details in fiction. In T.C. Brock (Chair), Models and mechanisms of narrative persuasion. Talk and symposium presented at the 111th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Mar R.A., Oatley K., Hirsh J., dela Paz J., Peterson J.B. (2006). Bookworms versus nerds: Exposure to fiction versus non-fiction, divergent associations with social ability, and the simulation of fictional social worlds. Journal of Research in Personality, 40, 694–712.
Marsh E.J., Fazio L.K. (2006). Learning errors from fiction: Difficulties in reducing reliance on fictional stories. Memory & Cognition, 34, 1140–1149.
Marsh E.J., Meade M.L., Roedigger H.L. III, (2003). Learning facts from fiction. Journal of Memory and Language, 49, 519–536.
McAdams D.P. (2001). The psychology of life stories. Review of General Psychology, 5, 100–122.
McAdams D.P. (2006). The redemptive self: Stories Americans live by. New York: Oxford University Press.
McAdams DP., Josselson R., Lieblich A. (Eds.). (2006). Identity and story: Creating the self in narrative. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
McKeough A., Genereux R. (2003). Transformation in narrative thought during adolescence: The structure and content of story compositions. Journal of Educational Psychology, 95, 537–552.
McKoon G., Ratcliff R. (1998). Memory-based language processing: Psycholinguistic research in the 1990s. Annual Review of Psychology, 49, 25–42.
McLean K.C., Pratt M.C. (2006). Life's little (and big) lessons: Identity statuses and meaning-making in the turning point narratives of emerging adults. Developmental Psychology, 42, 714–722.
Mellet E., Tzourio N., Crivello F., Joliot M., Denis M., Mazoyer B. (1996). Functional anatomy of spatial mental imagery generated from verbal instructions. Journal of Neuroscience, 16, 6504–6512.
Mesoudi A., Whiten A., Dunbar R. (2006). A bias for social information in human cultural transmission. British Journal of Psychology, 97, 405–423.
Miall D.S. (2000). On the necessity of empirical studies of literary reading. Frame: Utrecht Journal of Literary Theory, 14, 43–59.
Miall D.S. (2006). Literary reading: Empirical and theoretical studies. New York: Peter Lang.
Moore C., Macgillivray S. (2004). Social understanding and the development of prudence and prosocial behavior. In Baird J., Sokol B. (Eds.), New directions for child and adolescent development (pp. 51–62). New York: Jossey-Bass.
Narvaez D. (2002). Does reading moral stories build character? Educational Psychology Review, 14, 155–171.
Narvaez D., Gleason T., Mitchell C., Bentley J. (1999). Moral theme comprehension in children. Journal of Educational Psychology, 91, 477–487.
Nash R.J. (1997). Answering the virtuecrats: A moral conversation on character education. New York: Teachers College Press.
Nell V. (1988). Lost in a book: The psychology of reading for pleasure. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Nelson K. (2003a). Narrative and the emergence of consciousness of self. In Fireman G.D., McVay T.E., Flanagan O. (Eds.), Narrative and consciousness: Literature, psychology, and the brain (pp. 17–36). New York: Oxford University Press.
Nelson K. (2003b). Self and social functions: Individual autobiographical memory and collective narrative. Memory, 11, 125–136.
Nishitani N., Hari R. (2000). Temporal dynamics of cortical representation for action. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 97, 913–918.
Nussbaum M.C. (1990). Love's knowledge: Essays on philosophy and literature. New York: Oxford University Press.
Nussbaum M.C. (1995). Poetic justice: The literary imagination and public life. Boston: Beacon.
Oatley K. (1992). Best laid schemes: The psychology of emotions. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Oatley K. (1999). Why fiction may be twice as true as fact: Fiction as cognitive and emotional simulation. Review of General Psychology, 3, 101–117.
Oatley K. (2005). Scripts, transformations, and suggestiveness of emotions in Shakespeare and Chekhov. Review of General Psychology, 8, 323–340.
Oatley K., Gholamain M. (1997). Emotions and identification: Connections between readers and fiction. In Hjort M., Laver S. (Eds.), Emotion and the arts (pp. 163–281). New York: Oxford University Press.
Oatley K., Mar R.A. (2005). Evolutionary pre-adaptation and the idea of character in fiction. Culture and Evolutionary Psychology, 3, 181–196.
Oatley K., Yuill N. (1985). Perception of personal and interpersonal action in a cartoon film. British Journal of Social Psychology, 24, 115–124.
O'Neill D.K., Pearce M.J., Pick J.L. (2004). Preschool children's narratives and performance on the Peabody Individualized Achievement Test – Revised: Evidence of a relation between early narrative and later mathematical ability. First Language, 24, 149–183.
Özyürek A., Trabasso T. (1997). Evaluation during the understanding of narratives. Discourse Processes, 23, 305–355.
Palmer A. (2004). Fictional minds. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Pennebaker J.W., Graybeal A. (2001). Patterns of natural language use: Disclosure, personality, and social integration. Current Direction in Psychological Science, 10, 90–93.
Peskin J., Astington J.W. (2004). The effects of adding metacognitive language to story texts. Cognitive Development, 19, 253–273.
Pettigrew T., Tropp L. (2006). A meta-analytic test of intergroup contact theory. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90, 751–783.
Piaget J., Inhelder B. (1969). The psychology of the child. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Pierno A.C., Mari M., Glover S., Georgiou I., Castiello U. (2006). Failure to read motor intentions from gaze in children with autism. Neuropsychologia, 44, 1483–1488.
Poe E.A. (1967). The cask of Amontillado. In Galloway D. (Ed.), Edgar Allan Poe: Selected writings. Harmondsworth, United Kingdom: Penguin. (Original work published 1846)
Polichak J.W., Gerrig R.J. (2002). “Get up and win!”: Participatory responses to narrative. In Green M.C., Strange J.J., Brock T.C. (Eds.), Narrative impact (pp. 71–95). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Prentice D.A., Gerrig R.J., Bailis D.S. (1997). What readers bring to the processing of fictional texts. Psychonomic Bulletin Review, 4, 416–420.
Propp V.Y. (1968). Morphology of the folktale (L. Scott, Trans.). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Pulvermüller F., Härle M., Hummel F. (2001). Walking or talking?: Behavioral and neurophysiological correlates of action verb processing. Brain and Language, 78, 143–168.
Rapp D.N., van den Broek P. (2005). Dynamic text comprehension: An integrative view of reading. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 14, 276–279.
Repacholi B. (1998). Infants' use of attentional cues to identify the referent of another person's emotional expression. Developmental Psychology, 34, 1017–1025.
Ricci C.M., Beal C.R. (2002). The effect of interactive media on children's story recall. Journal of Educational Psychology, 94, 138–144.
Rizzolatti G., Arbib M.A. (1998). Language within our grasp. Trends in Neuroscience, 21, 188–194.
Rizzolatti G., Craighero L. (2004). The mirror-neuron system. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 27, 169–192.
Rizzolatti G., Fogassi L., Gallese V. (2001). Neurophysiological mechanisms underlying the understanding and imitation of action. Nature Reviews. Neuroscience, 2, 661–670.
Robbins T. (1990). Skinny legs and all. New York: Bantam Books.
Rosch E. (1973). Natural categories. Cognitive Psychology, 4, 328–335.
Rumelhart D.E. (1975). Notes on a schema for stories. In Bobrow D.G., Collins A. (Eds.), Representation and understanding: Studies in cognitive science (pp. 2–34). New York: Academic Press.
Sadoski M., Goetz E.T., Kangiser S. (1988). Imagination in story response: Relationships between imagery, affect, and structural importance. Reading Research Quarterly, 23, 320–336.
Satterfield T., Slovik S. (Eds.). (2004). What's nature worth? Narrative expressions of environmental values. Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press.
Satterfield T., Slovic S., Gregory R. (2000). Narrative valuation in a policy judgement context. Ecological Economics, 34, 315–331.
Saxe R., Wexler A. (2005). Making sense of another mind: The role of the right temporo-parietal junction. Neuropsychologia, 43, 1391–1399.
Scarry E. (1995). On vivacity: The difference between daydreaming and imagining-under-authorial instruction. Representations, 52, 1–26.
Schank R.C., Abelson R.P. (1977). Scripts, plans, goals, and understanding: An inquiry into human knowledge structures. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Schank R.C., Abelson R.P. (1995). Knowledge and memory: The real story. In Wyer R.S. Jr (Ed.), Advances in social cognition: Vol. VIII. Knowledge and memory: The real story (pp. 1–85). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Scheff T.J. (1979). Catharsis in healing, ritual, and drama. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Singer J.A. (2004). Narrative identity and meaning making across the adult lifespan: An introduction. Journal of Personality, 72, 437–459.
Smith A. (1956). Theory of moral sentiments. Edinburgh, Scotland: Kinkaid and Bell. (Original work published 1759)
Smith M. (1995). Engaging characters: Fiction, emotion, and the cinema. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
Smyth J.M. (1998). Written emotional expression: Effect sizes, outcome types, and moderating variables. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 66, 174–184.
Spreng R.N., Mar R.A., Kim A.S.N. (in press). The common neural basis of autobiographical memory, prospection, navigation, theory of mind and the default mode: A quantitative meta-analysis. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.
Stein S. (1995). Stein on writing. New York: St. Martins.
Stevenson R.L. (1992). A humble remonstrance. In Harman C. (Ed.), R.L. Stevenson essays and poems (pp. 1179–1188). London: Dent Everyman's Library. (Reprinted from Longman's Magazine, December 1884)
Strange J.J. (2002). How fictional tales wag real-world beliefs: Models and mechanisms of fictional influence. In Green M.C., Strange J.J., Brock T.C. (Eds.), Narrative impact: Social and cognitive foundations (pp. 263–286). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Strange J.J., Leung C.C. (1999). How anecdotal accounts in news and fiction can influence judgments of a social problem's urgency, causes, and cures. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 25, 436–449.
Swift G. (1983). Waterland. London: Heineman.
Taylor S.E., Crocker J. (1981). Schematic basis of social information processing. In Higgins E.T., Herman C.P., Zanna M.P. (Eds.), Social cognition: The Ontario symposium (Vol. 1, pp. 89–134). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Titchener E. (1909). Experimental psychology of the thought process. New York: Macmillan.
Tong F., Nakayama K., Moscovitch M., Weinrib O., Kanwisher N. (2000). Response properties of the human fusiform face area. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 17, 257–279.
Trabasso T., Chung J. (2004, January 23). Empathy: Tracking characters and monitoring their concerns in film. Paper presented at the Winter Text Conference, Jackson Hole, WY.
Trabasso T., Magliano J.P. (1996). Conscious understanding during comprehension. Discourse Processes, 21, 255–287.
Trabasso T., Wiley J. (2005). Goal plans of actions and inferences during comprehension of narratives. Discourse Processes, 39, 129–164.
Tsai J.L., Louie J.Y., Chen E.E., Uchida Y. (2007). Learning what feelings to desire: Socialization of ideal affect through children's storybooks. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 33, 17–30.
Tversky B. (2004). Narratives of space, time, and life. Mind and Language, 19, 380–392.
van den Broek P., Rapp D.N., Kendeou P. (2005). Integrating memory-based and constructionist processes in accounts of reading comprehension. Discourse Processes, 39, 299–316.
van Dijk T.A., Kintsch W. (1983). Strategies of discourse comprehension. New York: Academic Press.
Vitz P.C. (1990). The use of stories in moral development: New psychological reasons for an old education method. American Psychologist, 45, 709–720.
Walma van der Molen J.H., Van der Voort T.H.A. (1997). Children's recall of television and print news: A media comparison study. Journal of Educational Psychology, 89, 92–91.
Wang Q., Brockmeier J. (2002). Autobiographical remembering as cultural practice: Understanding the interplay between memory, self and culture. Culture and Psychology, 8, 45–64.
Wheeler S.C., Green M.C., Brock T.C. (1999). Fictional narratives change beliefs: Replications of Prentice, Gerrig, and Bailis (1997) with mixed corroboration. Psychonomic Bulletin Review, 6, 136–141.
Wilson G.M. (2003). Narrative. In Levinson J. (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of aesthetics (pp. 392–407). Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
Wilson M. (2002). Six views of embodied cognition. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 9, 625–636.
Winawer J., Huk A.C., Boroditsky L. (2008). A motion aftereffect from still photographs portraying depicting motion. Psychological Science, 19, 276–283.
Woolf V. (1924/1966). Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown. In Collected essays (Vol. 1, pp. 319–337). London: Chatto & Windus.
Zillmann D. (1994). Mechanisms of emotional involvement with drama. Poetics, 23, 33–51.
Zunshine L. (2006). Why we read fiction: Theory of mind and the novel. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press.
Zwaan R.A. (1994). Effect of genre expectations on text comprehension. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 20, 920–933.
Zwaan R.A. (2004). The immersed experiencer: Toward an embodied theory of language comprehension. In Ross B.H. (Ed.), The psychology of learning and motivation (Vol. 44, pp. 35–62). New York: Academic Press.
Zwaan R.A., Radvansky G.A. (1998). Situation models in language comprehension and memory. Psychological Bulletin, 123, 162–185.
Zwaan R.A., Stanfield R.A., Yaxley R.H. (2002). Language comprehenders mentally represent the shapes of objects. Psychological Science, 13, 168–171.
Cite article
Cite article
Cite article
OR
Download to reference manager
If you have citation software installed, you can download article citation data to the citation manager of your choice
Information, rights and permissions
Information
Published In
Article first published online: May 1, 2008
Issue published: May 2008
PubMed: 26158934
Authors
Metrics and citations
Metrics
Journals metrics
This article was published in Perspectives on Psychological Science.
View All Journal MetricsArticle usage*
Total views and downloads: 13573
*Article usage tracking started in December 2016
Altmetric
See the impact this article is making through the number of times it’s been read, and the Altmetric Score.
Learn more about the Altmetric Scores
Articles citing this one
Receive email alerts when this article is cited
Web of Science: 723 view articles Opens in new tab
Crossref: 717
- Age and cultural differences in the relationship between reading and theory of mind
- A framework for vicarious and collective memory, future projections and narrative identity
- From Hobbits to Harry Potter: A Psychological Perspective on Fantasy
- Dance and the Embodied Social Cognition of Mating: Carlos Saura’s Tango in the Perspective of the Tie-Up Theory
- Visual literacy and mental illness: using literacy quadrants with pre-service teachers
- Cultivating CSR: The Artistic Influence of Top Executives on Corporate Responsibility
- Thank you for the music: Music as a social surrogate that protects against social threats
- Possible Worlds Theory: How the Imagination Transcends and Recreates Reality
- Visualising anthropomorphism as a creative communicative mode in Samit Basu and Ashish Padlekar’s The Tall Tales of Vishnu Sharma: Panchatantra
- Enhancing Narrative Writing Abilities by Practicing Mentalization Skills
- View More
Figures and tables
Figures & Media
Tables
View Options
Access options
If you have access to journal content via a personal subscription, university, library, employer or society, select from the options below:
I am signed in as:
View my profileSign out
I can access personal subscriptions, purchases, paired institutional access and free tools such as favourite journals, email alerts and saved searches.
loading institutional access options
APS members can access this journal content using society membership credentials.
APS members can access this journal content using society membership credentials.
Alternatively, view purchase options below:
Purchase 24 hour online access to view and download content.
Access journal content via a DeepDyve subscription or find out more about this option.
