Martin Hecht | Department of Psychology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
A very influential idea in western aesthetics is that poems convey multifaceted affective states (moods). This interdisciplinary study compares the moods aroused by the poems with the moods the reader thinks the poem expresses. Further, aroused and expressed mood are compared to the mood the professional authors of the poems had intended. An experimental design with a total of 234 participants was employed. Main results are: (1) Readers’ expressed and aroused moods differ on average and between-person variation is somewhat higher in aroused mood. (2) Authors’ intended moods differ from readers’ expressed moods as well as from readers’ aroused moods. (3) Some readers acquire a special kind of experiential knowledge (knowledge-what-it-is-like to be in a specific mood) through the reception of a poem. In an exploratory fashion, the effects of literary education, classification as fiction, ascription of mood to a situation described in the poem, and reading time were investigated.
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Cited by (4)
Cited by four other publications
Schubert, Emery
2024. The Aesthetic Emotion Lexicon: A Literature Review of Emotion Words Used by Researchers to Describe Aesthetic Experiences. Empirical Studies of the Arts 42:1 ► pp. 3 ff.
Aumann, Antony
2023. Art, imagination, and experiential knowledge. Synthese 201:3
Gittel, Benjamin
2018. In the Mood for Paradox? Das Verhältnis von Fiktion, Stimmung und Welterschließung aus mentalistischer und phänomenologischer Perspektive. Journal of Literary Theory 12:2 ► pp. 300 ff.
Jacobs, Arthur M. & Roel M. Willems
2018. The Fictive Brain: Neurocognitive Correlates of Engagement in Literature. Review of General Psychology 22:2 ► pp. 147 ff.
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