Fictional characters (FCs) and mediated persons in literature, theater, film, art, TV, and digital media fulfil basic psychological functions, although the processes involved remain unspecified. Departing from identification and empathy hypotheses, a new context-sensitive model draws upon similarity studies, empirical aesthetics, persuasion, emotion and social psychology. The PEFiC-model (Perce...

In this study, 208 young adults completed questionnaires measuring their perceptions of and responses to their favorite fictional television characters, both male and female. Measures included perceived attitude similarity, perceived character attributes (smart, successful, attractive, funny, violent, admired), and wishful identification with the characters. Wishful identification was defined a...

Children's engagement with Japanese toys and fictional characters has taken on new significance in the age of YouTube. Drawing on ethnographic research on technology-mediated play among 8- and 9-year-olds in Norway, this article shows how boundaries between "real" humans and "fake" non-humans are blurred and undermined when children take on the perspective of a fictional pop star known as Miku....

Reading fiction is a major component of intellectual life, yet it has proven difficult to study experimentally. One aspect of literature that has recently come to light is perspective embedding ("she thought I left" embedding her perspective on "I left"), which seems to be a defining feature of fiction. Previous work (Whalen et al., 2012) has shown that increasing levels of embedment affects th...

ferdowsi's shahname is a literary work with many and varied personalities which can be converted to dramatic texts, but it needs to analyze on basis theories of dramatic characterization. characterization of the protagonist of the play, as a key element of the show has a special component such as action and motivation to handle dramatic action, a physical and mental characteristic that dis...

We study the detection of character types from fictional dialog texts such as screenplays. As approaches based on the analysis of utterances' linguistic properties are not sufficient to identify all fictional character types, we develop an integrative approach that complements linguistic analysis with interactive and communication characteristics, and show that it can improve the identification...