Call for papers Vol. 4 No. 1 (2025) – Moral emotions in fictional reception | nCOGNITO

nCognito (https://ojs.bibl.u-szeged.hu/index.php/ncognito/) is the open access peer reviewed Journal of the Cognitive Poetics Research Group (https://kognitiv.szegedigermanisztika.hu/en/), published on the OJS journal platform of the University of Szeged (Hungary). The journal publishes presents interdisciplinary research in literary studies and cognitive science. It aims to publish papers that examine what cognitive processes shape the reception of literary texts, films and other media, such as digital media, using findings of cognitive and evolutionary psychology as their theoretical and empirical foundation. Each issue of the journal explores, with a thematic emphasis, the cognitive and emotional mechanisms that have developed during evolution and their manifestations (for example, the influence of causal thinking, mindreading, narrative empathy, tension generation and moral judgement) in different aesthetic practices.

In pursuit of this objective, the journal welcomes a wide range of papers in the following broad areas of cognitive poetic scholarship: the aestheticization of meaning through metaphor, metonymy, allegories and symbols; metaphor and metonymy in the narrative fabric; the cognitive nature of poeticism; the understanding of narrative stories and the (re)construction of meaning from literary texts; the construction of mental representations of characters and fictional worlds; the emotional processes involved in the reception of art and literature, and other interdisciplinary issues.

The journal was launched in 2022, and an average of two numbers are published each year. From 2025 on, the journal will be published exclusively (mainly) in English.

Our aim is to accept papers from a wide range of authors and reach a broader academic audience. (We encourage submissions from a diverse range of authors spanning various backgrounds and geographies.)

In the next issue of our journal (2025/1), we invite papers that address the question of what narrative structures and poetic devices are used to evoke moral emotions in fictional works.

It is generally assumed that fictional narratives often function as ethical thought experiments and their interpretation depends on the moral judgment of the reader or viewer. The moral judgment of the recipient therefore plays a central role in understanding narratives. Recent research in moral psychology suggests that moral judgment is best described as the simultaneous operation of two cognitive systems, known as the dual-process model: one system operates quickly, effortlessly, and automatically, while the other system is slow, effortful, and conscious. The former is typically referred to as intuition, which is often emotionally charged and leads to deontological judgments, while the latter is called rational decision-making, which typically results in utilitarian decisions (Greene 2009). Empirical research on the reception of aesthetic narratives has shown that emotional judgment tends to dominate literary and film reception; in other words, recipients are more inclined to consume media content that does not require significant cognitive investment (Raney 2005; 2011; Vaage 2015).

Topics for the next issue include but are not limited to the following questions:

How do narrative and prose-poetic devices shape the recipient’s moral emotions?
To what extent does the degree of transparency of the character’s consciousness affect the recipient’s emotional reactions?
To what extent does narrative point of view influence emotional reactions?
How do moral emotions develop depending on other emotions elicited by the text?
How do the moral emotions of embarrassment and shame affect self-reflection and self-development of characters in fictional narratives?
How are moral emotions elicited in autobiographical/autofictional writings? Do they work differently on the reader than in the case of “pure” fiction?
How do narrative strategies eliciting the same moral emotion in fiction vary across cultures? Does translation of novels into culturally distant languages involve the use of transculturation strategies?
How do video games and other interactive media engage players’ moral emotions through narrative choices and consequences?
How do adaptations of literary works into films or plays affect the moral emotions experienced by the audience?
How does the setting of a narrative (e.g., dystopian, utopian, historical) influence the moral emotions of the reader?
How are woke and social taboo themes explored in art?

References

Bal P. Matthijs, & Veltkamp, Martijn. 2013. How does fiction reading influence empathy? An experimental investigation on the role of emotional transportation. PLoS ONE, 8, e55341. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0055341

Gaut, Berys. 2003. “Reasons, motions, and fictions.” In Imagination, Philosophy and the Arts, edited by Matthew Kieran and Dominic Lopes, 14–34. New York: Routledge.

Davies, Stephen. 2009. “Responding emotionally to fictions.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. 67. 269–284. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6245.2009.01358.x

Gendler, Tamar Szabó, and Karson Kovakovich. 2006. “Genuine rational fictional emotions.” In Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, edited by Matthew Kieran, 241–53. Oxford: Blackwell.

Greene, Joshua. 2009. “The Cognitive neuroscience of moral judgment.” In The Cognitive Neurosciences, edited by Michael S. Gazzaniga. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/8029.003.0086

Haidt, Jonathan. 2003. “The moral emotions”. In Handbook of Affective Sciences, edited by R. J. Davidson, K. R. Scherer, & H. H. Goldsmith, 852–870. Oxford University Press.

Hogan, Patrick Colm. 2018. Literature and Emotion. Routledge.

Kieran, Matthew. 2003. “Forbidden knowledge. The challenge of immoralism.” In Art and Morality, edited by Jose Luis Bermudez and Sebastian Gardner, 56–73. London: Routledge.

Mar, Raymond & Oatley, Keith & Djikic, Maja & Mullin, Justin. 2011. “Emotion and narrative fiction. Interactive influences before, during, and after reading.” Cognition & Emotion. 25. 818–833. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2010.515151

Mellmann, Katja (2016): Empirische Emotionsforschung. In Handbuch Literatur und Emotionen, edited by Martin von Koppenfels & Cornelia Zumbusch: Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter, 158–175.

Meskin, Aaron, and Jonathan M. Weinberg. 2003. “Emotions, fiction, and cognitive architecture.” The British Journal of Aesthetics 43: 18–34. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjaesthetics/43.1.18

Raney, Arthur A. 2005. “Punishing Media Criminals and Moral Judgment: The Impact on Enjoyment.” Media Psychology, no. 7, 145–63. https://doi.org/10.1207/S1532785XMEP0702_2

Raney, Arthur A. 2011. “The role of morality in emotional reactions to and enjoyment of media entertainment.” Journal of Media Psychology 23 (1): 18–23. https://doi.org/10.1027/1864-1105/a000027

Robinson, Jenefer. 2005. Deeper than Reason. Emotion and its Role in Literature, Music, and Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Vaage, Margrethe Bruun. 2015. “On the repulsive rapist and the difference between morality in fiction and real life.” In The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, edited by Zunshine, Lisa, 421–39. Oxford: Oxford University Press.