The movie of emotions: An experimental lab-lit novel

Scripta, 2022

Taking into consideration an intellectual atmosphere attentive to the interchanges between embodied cognition and literature, the objective of this paper is to introduce definitions, mechanisms, and functionalities of bodily reactions to human existence and the production of knowledge, based mainly on the investigations of the Portuguese neuroscientist Antonio Damasio. He has published several books and is one of the most influential researchers on the reciprocity among body, brain, mind, and situated experiences. By analyzing his investigations, it becomes possible to develop theoretical and analytical repertoires capable of contemplating emotion resulting from contact with literary fiction as relevant to their understanding.

College Literature, 2006

2009

The first thing that happens when we speak about emotions is that we don’t know what we are speaking about. The first confusion is the distinction between emotion, affect, mood, passion, feeling, sentiment, drive and other similar phenomena. Some of these terms reflect different approaches to the same problem, according to the psychological school from which we start. As my life is listening to patients, my point of departure is classical and descriptive psychopathology. This is an atheoretical school, whose rationality is to find, describe and analyse some damaged part in order to know how the whole machine works. In 1994, Paul Ekman and Richard Davidson published a book The nature of emotions in which the most outstanding researchers in the field discussed several topics on emotions. The second chapter of the book is related to the distinction between affective constructs. Besides Davidson and Ekman, there were answers from Nico Frijda, Goldsmith, Jerome Kagan, Lazarus, Panksepp, ...

Intervento al convegno "Cognitive Futures in the Arts and Humanities. 10th Annual Conference: From 4E to 5E Cognition. About Emotions", Università degli Studi di Catania, 2024

Within the framework of 5E Cognition, emotions play a fundamental role also in the field of literature, with particular reference to the creative process enacted by the author and the receptive process enacted by the reader. This paper aims to present an original category of analysis, the Gefühlstextualität, with which to trace the author’s emotions through the elements of the text, which in turn act as triggers eliciting new emotional reactions in the reader. More specifically, taking inspiration from the most recent transdisciplinary dialogues between literature and neuroscience, the main aim is to show a possible experimental application of Gefühlstextualität in the Reader-response perspective, focusing on the case study of Sophie von La Roche’s epistolary novel Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim (1771). This paper intends to describe the four phases of a designed experimental research, divided into offline and online tests, to measure the reader’s emotional response at a cognitive, neural, and somatic level. The most innovative aspect lies in phase 3, a laboratory test in which an electroencephalography (EEG) would be performed on participants, along with measurement of physiological parameters, refining then the results by fMRI and eye tracking tests on a smaller sample. The various phases of the research, one complementary to each other, are intended to prove how emotions – conveyed through Gefühlstextualität – play a central role in all aspects of the literary experience.

Comunicazioni Sociali, 2017

The aim of this paper is a reconsideration of the questions surrounding the film and audiovisual media experience in the light of the current debate in psychology and the neurosciences. It presents four steps to assess the current situation: first and most obviously, to define clearly both the field of research and the methodology proposed; secondly, to employ a grounding paradigm, which may be found in the concept of functional consciousness; thirdly, to address the core theories of the psychology of emotions, which today lies at the heart of the scientific debate, and to do sousing the most up-to-date tools, with particular regard to the psychological construction of emotion and subsequently that of the film and audiovisual media viewing experience; fourthly and finally, to define the relevance of the model with respect to the specific field of film and media, which will be done here through the use of classic filmological models that take into account the dynamics of the attribution of reality to film images, emotional participation, and cinematic self-projection. The last of these, in my view, allows us on the one hand to draw a richer and more up-to-date picture of the film and audiovisual media experience and, and on the other, to understand a neo-filmological approach as a mediator between phenomenology and functionalist psychology. Here, again, emotion will play a crucial role.

Synopsis: text, context, media, 2019

The general feeling of malaise, if not crisis, in Literary Studies forces us to urgently look for solutions that will bring the discipline forward. This article is a call for a concentration on fundamental issues in the study of literature, and at the same time for a more rigorous and accountable methodology in studying both the content and the form of literary texts as well as readers' reactions to them. Some illustrations of work in the area of Empirical Study of Literature are provided, showing how fiction is a powerful regulator of human emotion, especially by formal features of the text. Case 1 reports a study which looks at the influence of narrative perspective (internal focalization in the first place) on judgements of readers. Case 2 delves into the textual ingredients by which readers' absorption in a narrative world is enhanced. These ingredients are foremost of a kind that goes under the name of "foregrounding" devices in literary studies. The conclusion from the research is that texts that are rich in foregrounding are better able to elicit a more complex response , i.e., a more powerful impact, from readers. In its turn Case 3 looks at how readers react to literary pieces dealing with deep human suffering. The findings indicate that literature is able to evoke strong feelings of empathy through its formal make-up. The results also support the argument that one's exposure to literature is the main variable to have an impact on prosocial behaviour, irrespective of personality, gender, age or social situation. Thus we claim that literary texts exert a powerful influence on readers' value sharing, absorption and empathy, and the impact can only be studied empirically. The article shows a way out of the current crisis, not by just opening up a new fashion, in which literary texts are "inter-preted" in yet another way, mostly academically, but by taking literary texts seriously in their workings on the minds and hearts of readers-which is ultimately what texts are written for.

2009

In this study we have collected a corpus for training model for emotion detection in the context of monitoring artificial agent's by voice. In order to control occurrences of various range of affective state in a modeling purpose, we used acted emotional expression through dubbing play exercises. We observed that some natural affective states occurred during those exercises. We ran a perceptive test in order to validate our annotations: anger and sadness were the more consensual annotations.

PAGE PROOFS (please see Projections for finished article): Murray Smith's book "Film, Art, and the Third Culture" makes a significant contribution to cognitive film theory and philosophical aesthetics, expanding the conceptual tools of film analysis to include perspectives from neuroscience and evolutionary psychology. Smith probes assumptions about how cinema affects spectators by examining aspects of experience and neurophysiological responses that are unavailable to conscious, systematic reflection on experience and aesthetic techniques. This article interrogates Smith's account of emotion, empathy, and imagination in cinematic representation and film spectatorship, placing his work in dialogue with other recent interventions in the fields of cinema studies and embodied cognition. Smith's contribution to understanding the role of emotion in screen studies is vital, and when read in conjunction with recent publications by Carl Plantinga and Mark Johnson on ethical engagement and the moral imagination, this new work constitutes a notable advance in film theory.

The author discusses the difficulty in talking about emotions and related phenomena. Translations complicate the issue. However, emotions are a form of basic communication and organize themselves in order to establish lasting interpersonal relationships.