Fiction: The cryptic mind

Reading literary fiction improves theory of mind.

Understanding others' mental states is a crucial skill that enables the complex social relationships that characterize human societies. Yet little research has investigated what fosters this skill, which is known as Theory of Mind (ToM), in adults. We present five experiments showing that reading literary fiction led to better performance on tests of affective ToM (experiments 1 to 5) and cogni...

Pragmatic failure, mind style and characterisation in fiction about autism

This paper presents an analysis of different types of pragmatic failure in the interactional behaviour of the ‘autistic’ protagonists of three recent novels. Three main types of pragmatic failure occur across all three novels: problems with informativeness and relevance in conversational contributions; problems with face management resulting in unintentional impolite behaviours; and problems wi...

the crisis of identity in jhumpa lahiris fiction: interpreter of maladies and the namesake

شکل گیری هویت(identity) مقوله مهمی در ادبیات پراکنده مردم(diasporan literature) می باشد. آثار جومپا لاهیری(jhumpa lahiri) ، نویسنده هندی آمریکایی، در سالهای اخیر تحسین منتقدین را به خود معطوف کرده است. وی در این آثار زندگی مهاجران و تلاش آنان برای پیدا کردن جایگاهشان در یک فرهنگ بیگانه را به تصویر کشیده است. این تجربه همواره با احساساتی نظیر دلتنگی برای گذشته، بیگانگی و دوری همراه است. با این ح...

Fiction indexing and the development of fiction thesauri

The fiction of function

What is the function of the human hand? What are the functions of our fingers? One could give a very incomplete list of functions of the hand: holding cups, swatting mosquitoes, etc., and similarly for fingers: wrapping around things, pressing on things, holding rings, etc. This clearly is a pointless exercise—incomplete in the extreme—yet it is essentially the goal of many function representat...