The results of a re-reading experiment with 56 students between 16 and 19 using text passages from Stefan Zweig’s Schachnovelle (1942) reported in this contribution show that discussions in the literary classroom empower students to become more confident interpreters. The didactic focus of teaching units does not limit interpretative variability but instead upholds the ambiguity of literary texts. While a specific teaching focus guides students’ interpretations, it does not reduce overall variability. Through classroom discussions, students refine their interpretative skills, as seen in their more detailed and precise interpretations. They also become more adept at conceptualising character traits. However, this expertise does not translate into greater felt character understanding or empathy. An experimental investigation of the effects of a potential teaching strategy – character-focused re-readings – to foster understanding was undertaken. The findings indicate that targeted re-reading exercises allow teachers to shift the focus to potentially overlooked aspects, reshaping students’ perceptions particularly of antagonists and further enhancing their ability to assess character traits based on textual clues. However, the present results suggest that no clear association can be demonstrated between the introspective experience of re-reading and the accuracy of character models. Moreover, re-reading does not increase the extent to which students demonstrate empathy or form an emotional and cognitive connection with the characters.
Online video conference platforms, such as Zoom, are flexible, inexpensive, and efficient means to connect people over large distances and have been used for various communal reading events during the lockdown following COVID-19. One type of literary event that migrated online was the facilitator-led reading group practice, Shared Reading (SR). The affordances of the online platform may impact the interpersonal communication and socio-emotional dynamics of an event such as SR in ways that are still largely unexplored. This paper sets out to map the differences and similarities between online and on-site SR by triangulating a quantitative conversation analysis of 17 session transcripts with qualitative observations and reported experiences from both participants and facilitators. Overall, we found that the dialogue and readings in the online group tended to unfold in a more structured and guided manner, with the Reader Leader (RL) playing a more prominent role in creating engagement and a safe space. Affordances of the digital medium, such as a mediated dialogue and presence, likely contributed to such differences. These results may be relevant for practitioners and researchers working in online settings where people discuss meaningful and emotional topics, for example, in the context of bibliotherapy. The findings related to the RL’s role in online SR inform online RL practices and might have implications for supplementary RL training. This study aims to shed light on the possibilities and limitations of online SR to help increase its accessibility worldwide, especially for people who find themselves in a situation where their mobility is compromised.
Many current theories propose that engaging in stories in which human interaction and interpersonal relationships are addressed might train social-cognitive skills (theory of mind, empathy), but research has rarely focused on TV series as a prevalent audiovisual form of stories and on narrative processes (i.e., transportation and identification) that might moderate story effects. We conducted two naturalistic online studies in which the participants at home and at their convenience watched either three episodes of a fictional TV series that featured human interaction or a nonfiction documentary that featured no human interaction. In Study 1, 201 participants completed a theory-of-mind task and an empathy questionnaire before and after watching the TV stimuli. In Study 2, 165 participants completed the same two questionnaires and a media-based empathy questionnaire before and after watching the TV stimuli and again one week later. In addition, transportation and identification were assessed after watching the TV stimuli. Results of both studies indicate that viewers’ social-cognitive skills show no significant improvement after watching three episodes of fictional TV series compared to nonfiction documentaries. An additional small lab study with 46 participants mirrored the findings of the naturalistic online studies.
Narrative suspense represents a multifaceted cognitive-emotional response triggered by unfolding storylines. Recognized as a critical aesthetic element in literary narratives, its investigation has gained momentum across psychology, narratology, and related disciplines, with a focus on its textual, emotional, and cognitive underpinnings. The empirical foundations of such studies hinge critically on our capacity to quantify suspense, establishing a dependable suspense arc for narratives. Despite a plethora of methods available within current literature, all with their respective merits and limitations, the empirical measurement of suspense, particularly for written texts, poses a substantial challenge. This paper introduces a novel experimental paradigm to construct a high-resolution suspense arc for extended literary narratives within a laboratory setting. The methodology is exemplified using a German translation of Arthur Conan Doyle's The Brazilian Cat.
