Two experiments studied reader responses to structurally different versions of a short story by E. A. Poe. It was modified by flashback and anticipation to produce four additional versions. In Experiment 1, the following responses were collected: Curiosity, Excitement, Imagery, Impact, Interest, Pleasure, Pleasure at the Ending, Surprise, Surprise at the Ending, Suspense; moreover, readers were asked to judge characteristics of the text, that is Coherence, Facility, and Postdictability. Results show that three dimensions underlie narrative reception: Involvement while Reading, Evaluation of the Outcome, and Cognitive Evaluation. In Experiment 2, at pre-established points, readers were asked to evaluate some responses belonging to the first dimension, namely Curiosity, Interest, Pleasure, and Excitement. The analyses show different trends in text reception according to text structure.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
AlvermannD. E., & GuthrieJ. T. (1993). Themes and directions for the national reading research center. Athens, GA: National Reading Research Center.
2.
BennettD. (1979). The detective story: Towards a definition of genre. PTL: A Journal for Descriptive Poetics and Theory of Literature, 4, 233–266.
3.
BerlyneD. E. (1960). Conflict, arousal and curiosity. New York: McGraw-Hill.
4.
BerlyneD. E. (1971). Novelty, complexity and hedonic value. Perception and Psychophysics, 8, 279–286.
5.
BrewerW. F. (1996). Good and bad story ending and story completedness. In KreuzR. J. & MacNealyM. S. (Eds.), Empirical approaches to literature and aesthetics (pp. 261–274). Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
6.
BrewerW. F., & LichtensteinE. H. (1981). Event schemes, story schemes and story grammars. In LongJ. D. & BaddeleyA. D. (Eds.), Attention and performance, IX (pp. 363–379). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
7.
BrewerW. F., & LichtensteinE. H. (1982). Stories are to entertain: A structural affect theory of stories. Journal of Pragmatics, 6, 473–486.
8.
BrewerW. F., & OhtsukaK. (1988). Story structure and reader affect in American and Hungarian short stories. In MartindaleC. (Ed.), Psychological approaches to the study of literary narratives. Papers in text linguistics, 58 (pp. 133–158). Hamburg: Helmut Buske Verlag.
9.
CsikszentmihalyiM. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. New York: Harper & Row.
10.
CupchikG. C., & GebotysR. J. (1990). Interest and pleasure as dimensions of aesthetic response. Empirical Studies of the Arts, 8, 1–14.
11.
CupchickG. C., & LaslowJ. (1994). The landscape of time in literary reception: Character experience and narrative action. Cognition and Emotion, 8, 297–312.
12.
EcoU. (1979). Lector in fabula. Milan: Bompiani.
13.
GerrigR. J. (1993). Experiencing narrative worlds. On the psychological activities of reading.New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
14.
GerrigR. J. (1996). Participatory aspects on narrative understanding. In KreuzR. J. & MacNealyM. S. (Eds.), Empirical approaches to literature and aesthetics (pp. 127–142), Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
15.
GraesserA. C.HigginbothamM. W.RobertsonS. P., & SmithW. R. (1978). A natural inquiry into the national enquire: Self-induced versus task-induced reading comprehension. Discourse Processes, 1, 355–372.
16.
GraesserA. C.MillisK. K., & ZwaanR. A. (1997). Discourse comprehension. Annual Review of Psychology, 48, 163–189.
17.
HalaszL.ShortM., & VargaA. (2002). A cross-cultural study of fictional and non-fictional text understanding. Poetics, 30, 195–219.
18.
HidiS. (1990). Interest and its contribution as a mental resource for learning. Review of Educational Research, 60, 549–571.
Iran-NejadA. (1987). Cognitive and affective causes of interest and liking. Journal of Educational Psychology, 79(2), 120–130.
21.
Iran-NejadA., & OrtonyA. (1985). Qualitative and quantitative sources of affect: How valence and unexpectedness relate to pleasantness and preference. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 6, 257–278.
22.
Johnson-LairdP. N. (1983). Mental models. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
23.
JosèP. E., & BrewerW. F. (1984). Development of story liking: Character identification, suspense and outcome resolution. Developmental Psychology, 20, 911–924.
24.
KintschW. (1980). Learning from text, levels of comprehension, or: Why anyone would read a story anyway?Poetics, 9, 87–98.
25.
KintschW. (1996). Comprehension: A paradigm for cognition. New York: Cambridge University Press.
26.
KneepkensE. W., & ZwaanR. A. (1994). Emotions and literary text comprehension. Poetics, 23, 125–138.
27.
KreutzR. J., & MacNealyM. S. (1996). Empirical approaches to literature and aesthetics. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
28.
LevoratoM. C. (2000). Le emozioni della lettura [The emotions of reading]. Bologna: Il Mulino.
29.
LevoratoM. C., & BoscoloP. (2000, July). Cognitive and affective factors in the reading of narrative text. Paper presented at the 10th Annual Meeting of the Society for Text and Discourse, Lyon, France.
30.
LoewensteinG. (1994). The psychology of curiosity: A review and reinterpretation. Psychological Bulletin, 116, 75–98.
31.
MandlerG. (1982). The structure of value: Accounting for taste. In ClarkM. S. & FiskeS. T. (Eds.), Affect and cognition (pp. 3–36). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
32.
MandlerG. (1984). Mind and body: Psychology of emotion and stress. New York: Norton.
33.
MiallD. S. (1989). Beyond the schema given: Affective comprehension of literary narratives. Cognition and Emotion, 3, 55–78.
MiallD. S., & KuikenD. (1999). What is literariness? Three components of literary reading. Discourse Processes, 28, 121–138.
36.
MiallD. S., & KuikenD. (2002). A feeling for fiction: Becoming what we behold. Poetics, 30, 221–241.
37.
NellV. (1988). The psychology of reading for pleasure: Needs and gratifications. Reading Research Quarterly, 23, 6–50.
38.
OhtsukaK., & BrewerW. F. (1992). Discourse organization in the comprehension of temporal order in narratives. Discourse Processes, 15, 317–336.
39.
PoeE. A. (1990). The oblong box. In VittoriniE. (Ed. & It. Trans.), Il meglio dei racconti di Edgard Allan Poe (pp. 211–225). Milan: Mondadori. (Original work published 1850.)
40.
ReedJ. H., & ShallertD. L. (1993). The nature of involvement in academic discourse task. Journal of Educational Psychology, 85, 253–266.
41.
RenningerK. A.HidiS., & KrappA. (1992). The role of interest in learning and development.Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
42.
RobertsD. S.CowenP. S., & MacDonaldB. E. (1996). Effects of narrative structure and emotional content on cognitive and evaluative responses to film and text. Empirical Studies of the Art, 14, 33–47.
43.
RosenblattL. M. (1994). The transactional theory of reading and writing. In RuddellR. B.RuddellM. R., & SingerH. (Eds.), Theoretical models and processes of reading (4th ed., pp. 1057–1092). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.
44.
SadoskyM.GoetzE. T., & RodriguezM. (2000). Engaging texts: Effects of concreteness on comprehensibility, interest, and recall in four text types. Journal of Educational Psychology, 1, 85–95.
45.
SchankR. C. (1979). Interestingness: Controlling inferences. Artificial Intelligence, 12, 273–297.
46.
SchiefeleU. (1991). Interest, learning and motivation. Educational Psychologist, 26, 299–324.
47.
SchrawG.BruningR., & SvobodaC. (1995). Sources of situational interest. Journal of Reading Behavior, 27, 1–17.
48.
TanE. S. (1996). Emotion and the structure of narrative film. Film as an emotion machine. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
49.
TomashevskyT. (1965). Thematics. In LemonL. T. & ReisM. J. (Eds. & Trans.), Russian formalist criticism: Four essays (pp. 61–95). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. (Original work published 1925.)
50.
van DijkT. A., & KintschW. (1983). Strategies of discourse comprehension. New York: Academic Press.
51.
van OostendorpH., & ZwaanR. A. (1994). Naturalistic text comprehension. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
52.
WadeS. E., & AdamsR. B. (1990). Effects of importance and interest on recall of biographical text. Journal of Reading Behavior, 22, 331–353.
53.
ZillmanD. (1996). The logic of suspense and mystery. In KreutzR. J. & MacNealyM. S. (Eds.), Empirical approaches to literature and aesthetics (pp. 281–303). Norwood: Ablex.
54.
ZillmanD.HayT. A., & BryantJ. (1975). The effect of suspense and its resolution on the appreciation of dramatic presentations. Journal of Research in Personality, 9, 307–323.
