Aesthetic appraisals of literary style and emotional intensity in narrative engagement are neurally dissociable.

ABSTRACT: Humans are deeply affected by stories, yet it is unclear how. In this study, we explored two aspects of aesthetic experiences during narrative engagement - literariness and narrative fluctuations in appraised emotional intensity. Independent ratings of literariness and emotional intensity of two literary stories were used to predict blood-oxygen-level-dependent signal changes in 52 listeners from an existing fMRI dataset. Literariness was associated with increased activation in brain areas linked to semantic integration (left angular gyrus, supramarginal gyrus, and precuneus), and decreased activation in bilateral middle temporal cortices, associated with semantic representations and word memory. Emotional intensity correlated with decreased activation in a bilateral frontoparietal network

SUBMITTER: Hartung F 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8677754 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature