Gabriele Vezzani, Julia de Jonge, Ainur Kakimova, Anja Meyer, Simone Rebora, Krystyna Wieszczek and Massimo Salgaro
in NODES 21-22 →
2023
doi.org/10.57633/NODES-21/3-ENG
Theory of Mind (ToM), or mentalizing, occurs in literary reading when readers theorize about characters’ beliefs, emotions and intentions. Lisa Zunshine proposed (2022a) that literary fiction is characterized by complex embedment of mental states and thus requires readers to heavily rely on their ToM to make sense of the text they are confronted with. This article starts from this idea to explore empirically whether or not genre expectation affects readers’ mentalizing activity. It was assumed that experiment participants would invoke more ToM when expecting to read fiction than non-fiction. Data cannot confirm this hypothesis. We present the benefit of employing the Short Story Task proposed by Dodell-Feder et al. (2013) as a measure for character-specific ToM in empirical literary studies. The generalizability of such an approach to different kinds of textual stimuli is discussed.
Cite this article: Vezzani, G., de Jonge, J., Kakimova, A., Meyer, A., Rebora, S., Wieszczek, K., and Salgaro, M., (2023). Theory of Mind in fiction vs non-fiction reading. A test on TOM measurement tools in the literary field. Nodes (21-22):99-107, Numero Cromatico Editore, Roma