Centre for Language Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen, Erasmusplein 1, 6525 HT, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University Nijmegen, Kapittelweg 29, 6525 EN, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Cogn Res Princ Implic. 2022 Jul 30;7(1):72. doi: 10.1186/s41235-022-00419-0.
When two people read the same story, they might both end up liking it very much. However, this does not necessarily mean that their reasons for liking it were identical. We therefore ask what factors contribute to "liking" a story, and-most importantly-how people vary in this respect. We found that readers like stories because they find them interesting, amusing, suspenseful and/or beautiful. However, the degree to which these components of appreciation were related to how much readers liked stories differed between individuals. Interestingly, the individual slopes of the relationships between many of the components and liking were (positively or negatively) correlated. This indicated, for instance, that individuals displaying a relatively strong relationship between interest and liking, generally display a relatively weak relationship between sadness and liking. The individual differences in the strengths of the relationships between the components and liking were not related to individual differences in expertize, a characteristic strongly associated with aesthetic appreciation of visual art. Our work illustrates that it is important to take into consideration the fact that individuals differ in how they arrive at their evaluation of literary stories, and that it is possible to quantify these differences in empirical experiments. Our work suggests that future research should be careful about "overfitting" theories of aesthetic appreciation to an "idealized reader," but rather take into consideration variations across individuals in the reason for liking a particular story.
当两个人阅读同一个故事时，他们可能都非常喜欢它。然而，这并不一定意味着他们喜欢它的原因是相同的。因此，我们要问是什么因素促成了对一个故事的“喜欢”，以及最重要的是，人们在这方面是如何存在差异的。我们发现，读者喜欢故事是因为他们觉得故事有趣、有趣、悬疑和/或美丽。然而，欣赏这些成分与读者喜欢故事的程度之间的关系在个体之间存在差异。有趣的是，许多成分与喜好之间的关系的个体斜率（正相关或负相关）存在相关性。例如，这表明在兴趣和喜好之间显示出相对较强关系的个体通常在悲伤和喜好之间显示出相对较弱的关系。成分与喜好之间关系的强弱个体差异与与视觉艺术审美欣赏密切相关的专业知识的个体差异无关。我们的工作表明，考虑到个体在如何得出对文学故事的评价方面存在差异这一事实很重要，并且可以在实证实验中量化这些差异。我们的工作表明，未来的研究应该谨慎地将审美欣赏理论“过度拟合”到一个“理想化的读者”，而是考虑到个体对特定故事的喜好的原因的变化。
