Abstract: Research has shown that wrapping a visit to a museum around a story makes that visit more memorable. Blessing and Skowronek (2013) embedded activities for children at the Glazer Children’s Museum in a story that motivated each activity. We hypothesize that personalizing the story more, by including the child’s first name and other particular information provided by the child, will mak...

Automatic story comprehension is a fundamental challenge in Natural Language Understanding, and can enable computers to learn about social norms, human behavior and commonsense. In this paper, we present a story comprehension model that explores three distinct semantic aspects: (i) the sequence of events described in the story, (ii) its emotional trajectory, and (iii) its plot consistency. We j...

The short story “Song of Iliad” describes a future music therapy “performance space” in which children around the globe create music together, form a band and perform for others. The story encapsulates the human-driven design approach and presents an example of how future design processes might exploit emotion-driven design in creating highly personified products and services.

Between 1884 and 1936, Rudyard Kipling wrote over 300 short stories, most of which were first published in colonial cosmopolitan periodicals before being reissued short-story collections. This corpus contains a number critically neglected Gothic stories that fall into four groups: belong to the ghost-story tradition; represent encounter through gothic tropes horror uncanny but do not necessaril...

To determine the role played by the beta-adrenergic and corticosteroid systems in the modulatory effects of stress on declarative memory function, 42 young men were administered a placebo, propranolol (beta-adrenergic blocker), or metyrapone (corticosteroid synthesis inhibitor) before being submitted to a psychological stress protocol. Immediately after stress, subjects viewed a neutral story, ...