James E. Cutting and Kacie L. Armstrong, ‘Cryptic Emotions and the Emergence of a Metatheory of Mind in Popular Filmmaking’, Cognitive Science, 42 (2018), 1-28, doi: 10.1111/cogs.12586.

I’m just not ready to start writing blog posts about Skelton’s poetry yet. Give me another week. Maybe being on strike will make me feel more in tune with the urgency of the satirical voice. I don’t really expect anyone reading this to be engaged by this dramatic announcement, but there it is anyway.

*

Here’s something interesting. Cutting and Armstrong tell a story about the history of cinema with psychological ramifications. They are interested in reaction shots, and especially what they call ‘cryptic reaction shots’: ‘They depict a facial gesture that reflects a slightly negative and slightly aroused emotional state. Their use at the end of conversations, and typically at the end of scenes, helps to leave viewers in a state of speculation about what the character is thinking and what her thoughts may mean for the ongoing narrative’.
      Film-making, they say, ‘bootstraps from a large suite of psychological principles’, with ‘hard-won discoveries of framing, pacing, staging’ resulting from ‘trial and error’ and (crucially) some interesting ideas about our ways of understanding other minds seem to have ‘preceded systematic psychological study’. So they are advocating careful analysis of the history of film, because in order to make good work, creative artists have often had to have (at least) convincing and interesting ideas (may even good ideas, correct ideas) about how our thinking works.
      So that seems to be pretty close to what this blog is partly all about: the pursuit of insights into psychological subtleties that can be drawn out of the literary tradition. So, yes, I enjoyed reading this article!

Rolf Zwaan, ‘A Replication With A Wrinkle’, https://rolfzwaan.blogspot.co.uk/2018/01/a-replication-with-wrinkle.html

Oh dear oh dear I had planned to be posting about some of the stuff mentioned here by now, but it’s brewing a bit slowly. I don’t like to leave it too long between posts, so here’s one about some old friends.
      Kidd and Castano are getting to be legends on this blog, and rightly so. Their 2013 paper, arguing that reading literary fiction enhances our capacities to empathise with others, looks like a massive validation of my life choices. And yet, reluctantly, I find it hard to believe. So I have kept track of some ups and downs in its subsequent reception (e.g. here and here, and there are onward links to follow).
      This blog post by Rolf Zwaan links to two versions of a report on his attempt to replicate one key effect, where a difference was observed between literary fiction and non-literary fiction. In the Kidd and Castano paper, there was a difference between the empathy-bonus that resulted from reading proper serious fiction, and the one from just any old fiction. Wow, but don’t ask me to draw the line. In the first paper about his replication attempt, in Dutch, Zwaan et al. reported no effect of that sort; but in the second, written in English and after further analysis, they reported an effect.
      A strange and arresting scenario! The reason for the discrepancy, Zwaan explains, was a decision about what to do about the definition of reading. It seems reasonable to say that only those who had spent a certain amount of time looking at a passage could be described as having read it, and only those people should be included in the study. Zwaan et al. had set one threshold, Kidd and Castano another (actually a lower threshold, requiring less time per page); the former researchers applied the latter’s threshold to their own analysis, and got a new result.
      This is all very thought-provoking: about the subtleties of replication attempts, about the persistence of Kidd and Castano’s conclusions, but most of all, to me at least, about how you decide someone has read something properly. How long does it take to read a novel, after all? What relationship is there between the time taken and the benefits acquired, whatever they may be? The difficulty of answering that question seems like a reason why experience of fiction, or of any art, is an awkward basis for experiment. It seems right to hold each subject to some basic standards, but time, and place, and so on, may be experienced very differently by different people.

*

Also in replication news, I found this article interesting, a reflection on the current wave of replication attempts. It’s interesting, seeing different perspectives on the question ‘what are we doing to ourselves?’.

Movement in Renaissance Literature: Exploring Kinesic Intelligence, ed. Kathryn Banks and Timothy Chesters (Palgrave, 2017)

So this book has suddenly arrived, and I have an essay in it. I keep drafting sentences which grow to resemble Pindaric Odes, not in a good way, as I praise and thank the editors and the contributors. The thing is, this is one outcome of a particularly happy phase in my research career (not over yet!), thinking about fascinating things with fascinating people. I don’t think my enthusiasm for the line-up is just a matter of friendship, though — with essays (in order of appearance in the book) by Terence Cave, Ulrich Langer, Timothy Chesters, Kathryn Banks, Guillemette Bolens, Dominique Brancher, Laura Seymour, Mary Thomas Crane, Evelyn Tribble, and Ellen Spolsky (and me too), this is a really good way into a cool field.

I have written about kinesic intelligence on the blog here, and a little bit here. The phrase denotes the way that we draw inferences from our sensorimotor responses. It has been shown that our brains mirror, or simulate (no metaphor is perfect) the movements of others, and it has been plausibly argued that this is a basis on which we engage with others, interpret their intentions, understand their motivations, and so on. In literature, for example in descriptions of apparently minor gestures in novels, this ability is awakened, tested, and thought over.
      My essay is about ‘Vital Signs in Shakespeare’. I focused on the signs of life that an audience might look for when characters in his plays — as they frequently do — are on the border between death and animation. We might look out for breath, warmth, the feeling of weight, stirring. I argue that in the theatre we look at these things as the incidental by-products of a character’s being alive, but also as the intentional actions of a skilled actor handling a difficult challenge in their work. In the Shakespearean theatre our kinesic intelligence is engaged by the most basic signs of life via a curious route: we learn something about what it is like to be alive by thinking about what it takes to pretend to be alive. It was fun to write, and now it’s part of a book I heartily recommend.