In:Narrative Absorption
Edited by Frank Hakemulder, Moniek M. Kuijpers, Ed S. Tan, Katalin Bálint and Miruna M. Doicaru
[Linguistic Approaches to Literature 27] 2017
► pp. 217–249
Chapter 11Forms of absorption that facilitate the aesthetic and explanatory effects of literary reading
Published online: 9 November 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/lal.27.12kui
https://doi.org/10.1075/lal.27.12kui
Abstract
Rather than articulating a univocal conception of absorption, we provide a theoretical rationale for the Absorption-like States Questionnaire (ASQ), an instrument that incorporates alternative conceptions of absorption based upon contrasts between forms of (1) attention (sustained concentration and attentional reorienting); (2) embodied space (peri-personal and extra-personal space); (3) self-other relations (pre-enactive empathy and cognitive perspective-taking); and (4) verisimilitude (generalizing realism and self-implicating givenness). Structural equation modeling indicated that, in conjunction with open reflection, a type of absorption called expressive enactment distinctively predicted aesthetic outcomes. In contrast, also in conjunction with open reflection, a type of absorption called integrative comprehension distinctively predicted explanatory outcomes.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 1.1Contrasting assumptions about absorption-like states
- 1.2Aesthetic attitude (re-visited)
- 1.2.1Open reflection
- 1.2.2Performative explication
- 1.3Identifying specific sources of tension in theories of absorption
- 1.3.1Sustained concentration and attentional reorienting
- ASQ Attention items
- 1.3.2Peri-personal and extra-personal space
- ASQ embodied space items
- 1.3.3Pre-enactive empathy and cognitive perspective-taking
- ASQ self-other relation items
- 1.3.4Self-implicating givenness and generalizing realism
- ASQ verisimilitude items
- 1.3.1Sustained concentration and attentional reorienting
- 1.4Different forms of absorption
- Open reflection
- Integrative Comprehension, Expressive Enactment, Reactive Engagement
- 1.4.1Aesthetic and explanatory reading outcomes
- Aesthetic outcomes
- Explanatory outcomes
- 2.Discussion
- 2.1Research prospects
Notes References
References (129)
Andringa, E. (1996). Effects of “narrative distance” on readers’ emotional involvement and response. Poetics, 23, 431–452.
Beardsley, M. C. (1981). Aesthetics: Problems in the philosophy of criticism (2nd ed.). Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
Becker, A. H. (1997). Emergent and common features influence metaphor interpretation. Metaphor and Symbol, 12(4), 243–259.
Bezdek, M. A., Foy, J. E., & Gerrig, R. J. (2013). “Run for it!” Viewers’ participatory responses to film narratives. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 7(4), 409–416.
Black, M. (1962). Models and metaphors: Studies in language and philosophy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Brunyé, T. T., Ditman, T., Mahoney, C. R., & Taylor, H. A. (2011). Better you than I: Perspectives and emotion simulation during narrative comprehension. Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 23(5), 659–666.
Bullough, E. (1912). ‘Psychical distance’ as a factor in art and as an aesthetic principle. British Journal of Psychology, 5, 87–98.
Busselle, R., & Bilandzic, H. (2008). Fictionality and perceived realism in experiencing stories: A model of narrative comprehension and engagement. Communication Theory, 18(2), 255–280.
Carota, F., Moseley, R., & Pulvermüller, F. (2012). Body-part-specific representations of semantic noun categories. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 24(6), 1492–1509.
Cohen, T. (2012). Thinking of others: On the talent for metaphor. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Cardellicchio, P., Sinigaglia, C., & Costantini, M. (2013). Grasping affordances with the other’s hand: A TMS study. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 8(4), 455–459.
Cupchik, G. C. (2002). The evolution of psychical distance as an aesthetic concept. Culture & Psychology, 8(2), 155–187.
Crowell, S. (2005). Phenomenology is the poetic essence of philosophy: Maurice Natanson on the rule of metaphor. Research in Phenomenology, 35(1), 270–289.
Davis, M. H. (1980). A multidimensional approach to individual differences in empathy. JSAS Catalog of Selected Documents in Psychology, Vol. 10, No. 85.
De Hoop, H., & Hogeweg, L. (2014). The use of second person pronouns in a literary work. Journal of Literary Semantics, 43(2), 109–125.
De Jaegher, H., & Di Paolo, E. (2007). Participatory sense-making: An enactive approach to social cognition. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 6(4), 485–507.
De Young, C. G., Quilty, L. C., & Peterson, J. B. (2007). Between facets and domains: 10 aspects of the Big Five. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 93(5), 880–896.
Dickie, G. (1964). The myth of the aesthetic attitude. American Philosophical Quarterly, 1(1), 56–65. Retrieved from: <[URL]>
Djikic, M., & Oatley, K. (2014). The art in fiction: From indirect communication to changes of the self. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 8(4), 498–505.
Djikic, M., Oatley, K., & Moldoveanu, M. C. (2013). Opening the closed mind: The effect of exposure to literature on the need for closure. Creativity Research Journal, 25(2), 149–154.
Ellamil, M., Dobson, C., Beeman, M., & Christoff, K. (2012). Evaluative and generative modes of thought during the creative process. NeuroImage, 59(2), 1783–1794.
Fan, J., McCandliss, B. D., Sommer, T., Raz, A., Posner, M. I. (2002). Testing the efficiency and independence of attentional networks. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 14, 340–347.
Fialho, O. (2012). Self-modifying experiences in literary reading: A model for reader response. (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Alberta.
Fletcher, A. & Monterosso, J. (2016). The science of free-indirect discourse: An alternate cognitive effect. Narrative 24(1), 82–103.
Forgács, B., Bohrn, I., Baudewig, J., Hofmann, M. J., Pléh, C., & Jacobs, A. M. (2012). Neural correlates of combinatorial semantic processing of literal and figurative noun noun compound words. NeuroImage, 63(3), 1432–1442.
Forsey, J. (2007). Is a theory of the sublime possible? Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 65(4), 381–389.
Fuchs, T., & Koch, S. C. (2014). Embodied affectivity: On moving and being moved. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 508.
Gallagher, S. (2012). Neurons, neonates and narrative. In A. Foolen, U. M. Lüdtke, T. P. Racine, & J. Zlatev (Eds.), Moving ourselves, moving others: Motion and emotion in intersubjectivity, consciousness and language (pp. 167–196). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Gallagher, S., & Hutto, D. (2008). Primary interaction and narrative practice (pp. 17–38). In J. Zlatev, T. Racine, C. Sinha, & E. Itkonen (Eds.), The shared mind: Perspectives on intersubjectivity. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Gagné, C. L., & Spalding, T. L. (2009). Constituent integration during the processing of compound words: Does it involve the use of relational structures? Journal of Memory and Language, 60(1), 20–35.
Gendlin, E. T. (1992). The primacy of the body, not the primacy of perception. Man and World, 25(3), 341–353.
(1997). Experiencing and the creation of meaning: A philosophical and psychological approach to the subjective. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Gineste, M. -D., Indurkhya, B., & Scart, V. (2000). Emergence of features in metaphor comprehension. Metaphor and Symbol, 15(3), 117–135.
Gerrig, R. J. (1993). Experiencing narrative worlds: On the psychological activities of reading. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
(2011). Conscious and unconscious processes in readers’ narrative experiences. In G. Olson (Ed.), Current trends in narratology (Vol. 27, pp. 37–60). Berlin: De Gruyter.
Gerrig, R. J., & Jacovina, M. E. (2009). Reader participation in the experience of narrative. Psychology of Learning and Motivation, 51, 223–254.
Glenberg, A. M., & Gallese, V. (2012). Action-based language: A theory of language acquisition, comprehension, and production. Cortex, 48(7), 905–922.
Glucksberg, S., & Keysar, B. (1990). Understanding metaphorical comparisons: Beyond similarity. Psychological Review, 97(1), 3–18.
Graesser, A. C., Singer, M., & Trabasso, T. (1994). Constructing inferences during narrative text comprehension. Psychological Review, 94(101), 371–395.
Green, M. C., & Brock, T. C. (2000). The role of transportation in the persuasiveness of public narratives. Journal of personality and social psychology, 79(5), 701.
Green, M. C., Brock, T. C., & Kaufman, G. F. (2004). Understanding media enjoyment: The role of transportation into narrative worlds. Communication Theory, 14(4), 311–327.
Hintikka, J. (2003). The notion of intuition in Husserl. Revue Internationale de Philosophie, 224(2), 57–79. Retrieved from: <[URL]>
Hohwy, J., & Paton, B. (2010). Explaining away the body: Experiences of supernaturally caused touch and touch on non-hand objects within the rubber hand illusion. PLoS ONE, 5(2), e9416.
Hunt, R. A., & Vipond, D. (1985). Crash-testing a transactional model of literary reading. Reader: Essays in Reader-Oriented Theory, Criticism, and Pedagogy, 14, 23–39.
Husserl, E. (1962). Ideas: General introduction to pure phenomenology. (W. R. B. Gibson, Trans.) New York, NY: Collier Books.
(1983). Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and to a phenomenological philosophy (first book). (F. Kersten, Trans.). Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Ihde, D. (2007). Listening and voice: Phenomenologies of sound (2nd ed.). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Ingarden, R. (1961). Aesthetic experience and aesthetic object. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 21(3), 289–313.
Jacobs, A. M. (2014). Towards a neurocognitive poetics model of literary reading. In R. M. Willems (Ed.), Towards a cognitive neuroscience of natural language use (pp. 135–159). Cambridge: CUP.
(2015). Neurocognitive poetics: Methods and models for investigating the neuronal and cognitive-affective bases of literature reception. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 9, 186. .
Jones, L. L., & Estes, Z. (2005). Metaphor comprehension as attributive categorization. Journal of Memory and Language, 53(1), 110–124.
Kemmerer, D., Castillo, J. G., Talavage, T., Patterson, S., & Wiley, C. (2008). Neuroanatomical distribution of five semantic components of verbs: Evidence from fMRI. Brain and Language, 107(1), 16–43.
Kidd, D. C., & Castano, E. (2013). Reading literary fiction improves theory of mind. Science, 342(6156), 377–380.
Kivy, P. (2006). The performance of reading: An essay in the philosophy of literature. Malden, MA; Blackwell.
Koelsch, S., Jacobs, A. M., Menninghaus, W., Liebal, K., Klann-Delius, G., et al. (2015). The quartet theory of human emotions: An integrative and neurofunctional model. Physics of Life Reviews, 13, 1–27.
Konečni, V. J. (2008). Does music induce emotion? A theoretical and methodological analysis. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 2(2), 115–129.
Koriat, A. (2000). The feeling of knowing: Some metatheoretical implications for consciousness and control. Consciousness and Cognition, 9(2), 149–171.
Klatzky, R. (1998). Allocentric and egocentric spatial representations: Definitions, distinctions, and interconnections. In C. Freske, C. Habel & K. F. Wender (Eds.), Spatial cognition: An interdisciplinary approach to representing and processing spatial knowledge (pp. 1–17). Berlin: Springer.
Koopman, E. M, & Hakemulder, F. (2015). Effects of literature on empathy and self-reflection: A theoretical-empirical framework. Journal of Literary Theory, 9(1), 79–111.
Kotovych, M., Dixon, P., Bortolussi, M., & Holden, M. (2011). Textual determinants of a component of literary identification. Scientific Study of Literature, 1(2), 260–291.
Kuijpers, M. M., Hakemulder, F., Tan, E. S., & Doicaru, M. M. (2014). Exploring absorbing reading experiences: Developing and validating a self-report scale to measure story world absorption. Scientific Study of Literature, 4(1), 89–122.
Kuiken, D., Busink, R. Miall, D. S., Cey, R. (2003). Withdrawing to engage: How literary reading penetrates consciousness. Paper presented at a workshop on the theme “How Literature Enters Life II,” Utrecht, The Netherlands, June 26–28.
Kuiken, D., Campbell, P., & Sopčák, P. (2012). The Experiencing Questionnaire: Locating exceptional reading moments. Scientific Study of Literature, 2(2), 243–272.
Kuiken, D., Miall, D. S., & Sikora, S. (2004). Forms of self-implication in literary reading. Poetics Today, 25(2), 171–203.
Kuiken, D., & Oliver, M. B. (2013). Aesthetic engagement during moments of suffering. Scientific Study of Literature, 3(2), 294–321.
Kuiken, D., & Sharma, R. (2013). Effects of loss and trauma on sublime disquietude during literary reading, Scientific Study of Literature, 3(2), 240–265.
Lishner, D. A., Batson, C. D., & Huss, E. (2011). Tenderness and sympathy: Distinct empathic emotions elicited by different forms of need. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 37(5), 614–625.
Mangen, A., & Kuiken, D. (2014). Lost in an iPad: Narrative engagement on paper and tablet. Scientific Study of Literature, 4(2), 150–177.
Mar, R. A., & Oatley, K. (2008). The function of fiction is the abstraction and simulation of social experience. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3(3), 173–192.
Maranesi, M., Bonini, L., & Fogassi, L. (2014). Cortical processing of object affordances for self and others’ action. Frontiers in Psychology, 5.
Menninghaus, W., Wagner, V., Hanich, J., Wassiliwizky, E., Kuehnast, M., & Jacobsen, T. (2015). Towards a psychological construct of being moved. PloS One, 10(6),
Miall, D. S., & Kuiken, D. (1994). Foregrounding, defamiliarization, and affect: Response to literary stories. Poetics, 22, 389–407.
Moseley, R., Carota, F., Hauk, O., Mohr, B., & Pulvermüller, F. (2012). A role for the motor system in binding abstract emotional meaning. Cerebral Cortex, 22, 1634–1647.
Natanson, M. A. (1998). The erotic bird: Phenomenology in literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Nell, V. (1988). Lost in a book: The psychology of reading for pleasure. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Oliver, M. B., & Woolley, J. K. (2011). Tragic and poignant entertainment. In The Routledge handbook of emotions and mass media (pp. 134–157). New York, NY: Routledge.
Ortony, A. (1979). Beyond literal similarity. Psychological Review, 86(3), 161–180. Retrieved from <[URL]>
Panksepp, J., & Biven, L. (2012). The archaeology of mind: Neuroevolutionary origins of human emotions (1st ed.). New York, NY: W. W Norton.
Pavani, F., & Castiello, U. (2003). Binding personal and extra-personal space through body shadows. Nature Neuroscience, 7(1), 14–16.
Perry, A., & Shamay-Tsoory, S. (2013). Understanding emotional and cognitive empathy: A neuropsychological perspective. In S. Baron-Cohen, M. Lombardo, & H. Tager-Flusberg (Eds.), Understanding other minds: Perspectives from developmental social neuroscience (pp. 178–190). Oxford: OUP.
Petersen, S. E., & Posner, M. I. (2012). The attention system of the human brain: 20 years after. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 35(1), 73–89.
Perrone-Bertolotti, M., Kujala, J., Vidal, J. R., Hamame, C. M., Ossandon, et al. (2012). How silent is silent reading? Intracerebral evidence for top-down activation of temporal voice areas during reading. The Journal of Neuroscience, 32(49), 17554–17562.
Przyrembel, M., Smallwood, J., Pauen, M., & Singer, T. (2012). Illuminating the dark matter of social neuroscience: Considering the problem of social interaction from philosophical, psychological, and neuroscientific perspectives. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 6, 190.
Raz, G., Jacob, Y., Gonen, T., Winetraub, Y., Flash, T., Soreq, E., & Hendler, T. (2014). Cry for her or cry with her: Context-dependent dissociation of two modes of cinematic empathy reflected in network cohesion dynamics. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 9(1), 30–38.
Ricoeur, P. (1981). The rule of metaphor: Multi-disciplinary studies of the creation of meaning in language. (R. Czerny, K. McLaughlin, & J. Costello, Trans.). Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Scheff, T. (1979). Catharsis in healing, ritual, and drama. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Segal, E. M. (1995). Narrative comprehension and the role of deictic shift theory. In J. F. Duchan, G. A. Bruder, & L. Hewitt (Eds.) Deixis in narrative: A cognitive science perspective (pp 3–17). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Seilman, U., & Larsen, S. F. (1989). Personal resonance to literature: A study of remindings while reading. Poetics, 18(1–2), 165–177.
Sikora, S., Kuiken, D., & Miall, D. S. (2011). Expressive reading: A phenomenological study of readers’ experience of Coleridge’s “The rime of the ancient mariner.” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 5(3), 258–268.
Silvia, P. J. (2010). Confusion and interest: The role of knowledge emotions in aesthetic experience. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 4(2), 75–80.
Silvia, P. J., & Nusbaum, E. C. (2011). On personality and piloerection: Individual differences in aesthetic chills and other unusual aesthetic experiences. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 5(3), 208–214.
Sircello, G. (1993). How is a theory of the sublime possible? Journal of Aesthetics & Art Criticism, 51(4), 541–550.
Smith, J. D., Zakrzewski, A. C., Herberger, E. R., Boomer, J., Roeder, J. L., Ashby, F. G., & Church, B. A. (2015). The time course of explicit and implicit categorization. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 77(7), 2476–2490.
Sopčák, P. (2007). ‘Creation from nothing’: A foregrounding study of James Joyce’s drafts for Ulysses. Language and Literature, 16(2), 183–196.
(2011). Epiphanies of finitude: A phenomenological study of existential reading. (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Alberta.
Sowa, R. (2011). Deictic abstractions: On the occasional references to ideal objectivities producible with the words “this” and “thus.” Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, 42(1), 5–25.
Spunt, R. P., & Lieberman, M. D. (2011). An integrative model of the neural systems supporting the comprehension of observed emotional behavior. Neuroimage, 59, 3050–3059.
(1978). “The aesthetic attitude” in the rise of modern aesthetics. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 36(4), 409.
Stern, D. N. (2010). Forms of vitality: Exploring dynamic experience in psychology, the arts, psychotherapy, and development. Oxford: OUP.
Stueber, K. R. (2012). Varieties of empathy: Neuroscience and the narrativist challenge to the contemporary theory of mind debate. Emotion Review, 4(1), 55–63.
Tellegen, A. & Atkinson, G. (1974). Openness to absorbing and self-altering experiences (“absorption”), a trait related to hypnotic susceptibility. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 83, 268–277.
Tourangeau, R., & Rips, L. (1991). Interpreting and evaluating metaphors. Journal of Memory and Language, 30(4), 452–472.
Tourangeau, R., & Sternberg, R. J. (1982). Understanding and appreciating metaphors. Cognition, 11(3), 203–244.
Tsunemi, K., & Kusumi, T. (2011). The effect of perceptual and personal memory retrieval on story comprehension. Psychologia, 54, 119–134.
Van Peer, W. (1986). Stylistics and psychology: Investigations of foregrounding. London: Croom Helm.
Vega-Moreno, R. (2004). Metaphor interpretation and emergence. UCL Working Papers in Linguistics, 16, 297–322.
Vipond, D., & Hunt, R. A. (1984). Point-driven understanding: Pragmatic and cognitive dimensions of literary leading. Poetics: International Review for the Theory of Literature, 13(3), 261–277.
Walter, H. (2012). Social cognitive neuroscience of empathy: Concepts, circuits, and genes. Emotion Review, 4(1), 9–17.
Wild, T. C., Kuiken, D., & Schopflocher, D. (1995). The role of absorption in experiential involvement. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69(3), 569–579.
Willems, R. M., Toni, I., Hagoort, P., & Casasanto, D. (2010). Neural dissociations between action verb understanding and motor imagery. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 22(10), 2387–2400.
Zentner, M., Grandjean, D., & Scherer, K. R. (2008). Emotions evoked by the sound of music: Characterization, classification, and measurement. Emotion, 8(4), 494–521.
Zunshine, L. (2006). Why we read fiction: Theory of mind and the novel. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press.
Zwaan, R. A. (1999). Situation models: The mental leap into imagined worlds. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 8(1), 15–18.
Cited by (13)
Cited by 13 other publications
Sopcak, Paul
Ghasseminejad, Melina & María-Ángeles Martínez
Vanhees, Claudio, Mathea Simons & Vanessa Joosen
Errington, Patrick J., Melissa Thye, Daniel Mirman & Thomas Holtgraves
Price, Hazel
Sopcak, Paul, Don Kuiken & Shawn Douglas
Kuijpers, Moniek M.
2021.
Postscript. In Style and Reader Response [Linguistic Approaches to Literature, 36], ► pp. 217 ff.
Kuijpers, Moniek M.
2021. Exploring the dimensional relationships of story world absorption. Scientific Study of Literature 11:2 ► pp. 266 ff.
Kuiken, Don, Shawn Douglas & Moniek Kuijpers
2021. Openness to experience, absorption-like states, and the aesthetic, explanatory, and pragmatic effects of literary reading. Scientific Study of Literature 11:2 ► pp. 148 ff.
Deane, Paul
Mak, Marloes, Clarissa de Vries, Roel M. Willems, Rolf Zwaan & Valentina Bambini
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 25 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.
