We Actually 'Become' Happy Vampires or Contented Wizards When Reading a Book

“‘Becoming a Vampire Without Being Bitten: The Narrative Collective Assimilation Hypothesis,’ published in the current issue journal Psychological Science, presents research supporting the authors' hypothesis that by absorbing narratives, we can psychologically become a member of the group of characters described therein, a process that makes us feel connected to those characters and their social world.

Authors Shira Gabriel, PhD, associate professor of psychology at UB, and Ariana Young, a UB graduate student working in the field of social psychology, also found that the sense of belonging that results from assimilating narratives provokes the same feelings of satisfaction and happiness we would have if we actually were part of the world described.”

So do you have any ideas about whether it could be somehow of use in real life?

I believe studies show that empathy with groups who use a language is important for learning that language in various ways, from overall success to parameters such as accent. Perhaps related in general to managing positive affect in learning. There's also the role of narrativity in creating fictive worlds to immerse oneself in. Learning, especially language, is embodied and situated and the more you can take advantage of this, the better. Fiction, therefore, with its rich layers of semiotic features, seems particularly advantageous an ecology for study. Studies such as that which I linked above, as they investigate such features and how readers react to them, will help identify elements for inclusion and refinement in the construction of materials and strategies. Doing so in an empirical fashion like this is relatively new and important in order to provide scientifically sound data.

This is slightly offtopic, but


So suppose that while reading you feel that you live through the life of a character.

You feel his emotions, you engage in the character's actions, way of thinking and also become interested in the things that that character is interested in (if those interests are essential/important to the narrative and are not contradicting your own interests, and also aren't too hard to grasp and understand.)

So let's say every character has some things that he/she is interested in and the story describes that character learning or even exposes the learning process in slightly more detail.

Now Imagine that you read a mountain of fictional books and encounter the ways of learning of all those characters and their interests towards certain issues/subjects.

This read mountain of books would provide us with a map of interests of those characters. So let's say 10 characters interested in history, 15 interested in biology and 20 interested in technology, etc.

In case the book explored those interests and subjects in a positive light, it could be said that the reader acquired more interest towards those subjects, because the reader was experiencing the life of lots of characters who were interested in those subjects.

This would lead me to a conclusion that reading fiction could also broaden our interests and bring about more interest/motivation towards studying certain fields.
And an interest/motivation makes learning feel easier, faster, painless etc.
This interest and motivation should allow the reader's brain to later (during later studying) absorb new information with less frustration, more efficiently perhaps due to greater well-being while learning. This well-being would also ensure that the reader will continue to study and broaden his/her's knowledge.

Which in turn leads me to a conclusion that if I read a mountain of books, I will become more interested in various issues due to the experiences/emotions/personalities of book characters whose story I have partly lived through.

And might I suggest, that having read a mountain of fictional books, thus, increases the probability of the reader becoming a more intelligent (wider, deeper knowledge) person.


What do you think about this?

nest0r Wrote:“‘Becoming a Vampire Without Being Bitten: The Narrative Collective Assimilation Hypothesis,’ published in the current issue journal Psychological Science, presents research supporting the authors' hypothesis that by absorbing narratives, we can psychologically become a member of the group of characters described therein, a process that makes us feel connected to those characters and their social world.

This is one of those studies that lay people will hear and be like "Well duh, I knew that, common sense. Why'd they give this person X thousands in funding?"
But ya, it really does make sense when you think about it. I have realized for years now that the best stories/movies/animes/books/etc are those where the writer is good at getting you to connect with the characters and FEEL for them. I can actually think of 2 animes off the top of my head, where if you skipped character building background in the first season, the second season wouldn't have as much impact or connection (Higurashi and Clannad).

@jettyke: I think its an interesting thought experiment(?). However, thinking about it I think the major thing that would depend on whether it happens though would be how "in tune" with the character you become. Which I actually think the more capable you are at "becoming a character" you read about might show some signs of mental disorder since it means your sense of self is fluid. Either way. Someone that can read a book and keep the idea of "them" separate from the person they are reading about probably wouldn't gain interest from simply "being" the character. Maybe if the person finds the stuff interesting they'll look it up. I'll have to think up a better response later, 6am and I need sleep. Simply put, there's a lot of stuff that makes the idea difficult to follow IMO.

On a related note, reading in general contributes to crystallized intelligence (if one uses this model of crystallized/fluid).

Some of the skeletal structure for my ideas on why mixed logographs/phonographs are best for literacy (tangential to this topic) because of vocabulary acquisition processes over time is based on some work by Stanovich and Cunningham, which is referenced in that Oatley & Mar paper in the sibling thread to this one. Might find those of interest:

Cunningham, A. E. & Stanovich, K. E. (1997). Early reading acquisition and its relation to reading experience and ability 10 years later.

Stanovich, K. E. & Cunningham, A. E. (1993). Where does knowledge come from? Specific associations between print exposure and information acquisition.

Stanovich, K. E. (1993). Does reading make you smarter? Literacy and the development of verbal intelligence. (Related)

"Crystallized intelligence is the ability to use skills, knowledge, and experience. It should not be equated with memory or knowledge, but it does rely on accessing information from long-term memory.

Crystallized intelligence correlates with abilities that depend on knowledge and experience, such as vocabulary, general information, and analogies."

Yeah this makes sense why it could help in social situations.


"The categories of adult reading matter contain words that are two or three times rarer than those heard on television. These relative differences in word rarity have direct implications for vocabulary development. If most vocabulary is acquired outside of formal teaching, then the only opportunities to acquire new words occur when an individual is exposed to a word in written or oral language that is outside his/her current vocabulary. That this will happen vastly more often while reading than while talking or watching television is illustrated in the second column of Table 1. "

This is something to keep in mind.

jettyke Wrote:"Crystallized intelligence is the ability to use skills, knowledge, and experience. It should not be equated with memory or knowledge, but it does rely on accessing information from long-term memory.

Crystallized intelligence correlates with abilities that depend on knowledge and experience, such as vocabulary, general information, and analogies."

Yeah this makes sense why it could help in social situations.


"The categories of adult reading matter contain words that are two or three times rarer than those heard on television. These relative differences in word rarity have direct implications for vocabulary development. If most vocabulary is acquired outside of formal teaching, then the only opportunities to acquire new words occur when an individual is exposed to a word in written or oral language that is outside his/her current vocabulary. That this will happen vastly more often while reading than while talking or watching television is illustrated in the second column of Table 1. "

This is something to keep in mind.

Okay let's say reading improves our vocabulary.
But it barely has any influence on the beautiful gaijin accent and the quality of pronunciation.
I wonder what could be as efficient as reading for vocabulary, only for correct pronunciation.

In addition to vocabulary, there's also ‘variety’ of language features that is increased in written language, especially fiction (see the work of M.A.K. Halliday and Douglas Biber).

Here's a piece on empathy and accent I posted before: http://www.physorg.com/news169119979.html

In addition to the above ‘language ego’, there's (also previously posted) ‘language synchrony’: http://www.labspaces.net/106770/What_mim...lationship

@jettyke
If you want to work on your accent while also improving your vocab efficiently through reading, the obvious solution is to focus on materials that include audio to listen to, things like audiobooks, TV with transcripts etc. As long as you keep listening a lot your accent will improve. You start to pick up on a lot of the really subtle things like pitch accent eventually even if you don't formally try to master them. As you advance, it gets less important if your listening material is the same as your reading material, so multitasking in this way isn't strictly necessary. But try not to neglect listening practice and your accent will improve.

nest0r Wrote:Here's a piece on empathy and accent I posted before: http://www.physorg.com/news169119979.html

So basically
1) read lots of text in the target language.
2) read stuff that makes you understand that nation more
3) become more emphatic in regards to this new obtained knowledge
4) make the improvement of your pronunciation more probable.

There's also the idea of the ideal L2 self, which I also posted about before, along with some tangential links:

http://etheses.nottingham.ac.uk/550/

- The ideal L2 selves of Japanese learners of English [pdf]

From Motivation, Language Identity and the L2 Self: http://books.google.com/books?id=59fl2aQ...&q&f=false

Somewhat related:

Japanese national identification and English language learning processes

Effects of Japanese national identification on attitudes toward learning English and self-assessed English proficiency

Somewhy those links talk about stuff, but don't reach an interesting, brief conclusion.
I didn't read everything, but more-or-less read all the conclusions.

So what is an ideal L2 self?

‘Ideal L2 SeIf’: The L2-specific facet of one’s ‘ideal self’ - if the person we would like to become speaks an L2, the ‘ideal L2 self’ is a powerful motivator to learn the L2 because we would like to reduce the discrepancy between our actual and ideal selves.

- http://www.slideshare.net/cupidlucid/dor...ion-710019 (p. 12+, though reading earlier pages of the presentation is good for accessible intro to background concepts such as ‘integrativeness’)

For more from the originally posted thesis and stuff that Ryan adds, see pp. 112+.

"So how did I get good enough to take level one without studying very much? I think the answer is my reading. I've always been an enthusiastic reader. "

"I started off by reading manga, and even that wasn't so easy to understand - and I knew quite a lot of Japanese already. But slowly, I got used to it, and reading in Japanese became a habit. In fact, almost the only revision I did for the JLPT level two in 2008 was reading manga."

http://c3staff.exblog.jp/13772784/

It might be a hard nut, but what about manga?
It's not text and it's not video.

It's art + text. And it gives you a part of what tv does. It has visual clues, which is what books don't.Would manga then be something in between?

It's still narrative/fiction, it's that it's also multimodal (which as we know, is awesome) and comes with its own semiotic features as part of expanding definitions of literacies.

See: http://bama.ua.edu/~jstallwo/bogota08/ar...teracy.pdf

Also: http://books.google.com/books?id=rk3j6Xc_LaEC (I like the incorporation of SFL stuff here, e.g. references to Matthiessen and ‘the multimodal page’ when discussing McCloud's ‘picture plane’, and even including ‘systemic functional linguistics’ in the glossary.)

How do you always find such awesome information?

Do you use a certain forum, read Science Daily or have specific google keywords?


"Manga readers are likely to attend to graphical information at the same hier-
archical level as the printed text. This is a drastic change from traditional reading that involves attending first and foremost to the written text, using pictures and illustrations only as supplements to it (Carrington, 2004)."

Does this just mean that you use your attention on graphics and text equally, or that you don't separate text and pictures, but attend to both at the same time?

I think they're referring to the prominence of the visual in a myriad of ways, in terms of how the visual and textual combine to make meaning. Instead of lengthy passages of text with occasional pictures, you have constant interactions of text and image with much more information being conveyed in the imagery during the narrative. There are chapters in the above-linked book about strategies children use to read manga, such as focusing on speech balloons and faces, what panels they read, how they skip over and reread sections, etc.

I'm not saying that when I recommend books you can usually ‘procure’ them ‘cheaply’ via Google, but...

Skimming through, the parts about cohesive ties and furigana/kanji stands out to me, now that I've learned more about SFL since first encountering the Reading Japan Cool book. Hmm, so much to do with regards to applying these ideas to Japanese...