Dr. Sabiha Alam Choudhury: February 2021

Phone Fears And Dolphin Directions: The Week’s Best Psychology Links

Our weekly round-up of the best psychology coverage from elsewhere on the web

In 2001, Air Transat Flight 236 lost engine power and made an emergency landing in the Azores. All passengers survived, but for 30 terrifying minutes, many thought they were going to die. Writing for Wired, Erika Hayasaki has the fascinating story of one of those passengers, Margaret McKinnon, a psychologist who then went on to study why some survivors developed PTSD and others did not — and who is now looking at the mental health of frontline workers during the pandemic.

Although we often think of mental health disorders as falling neatly into discrete categories — “depression”, say — the reality is that they can present quite differently in different people. So could treatments like brain stimulation be personalised to individuals? Kim Tingley takes a look at The New York Times.

Many of us experience a feeling of dread when the phone rings — or when we have to make a call. At The Conversation, Ilham Sebah explains why we experience phone anxiety, and what we can do to get over it. (And, as we reported last year, you may actually get more out of phone calls than you expect).

Undark has a nice podcast this week about the hope — and hype — surrounding the use of psychedelics as antidepressants. It’s a great place to start for a balanced overview of where the field is at.

We reported earlier this week on the similarities between dolphin and human personalities — but do dolphins also have “handedness” like humans? Past work had suggested that the aquatic mammals showed behavioural asymmetries in their movements, preferring to spin rightward. But a new study casts doubt on those findings, writes researcher Kelly Jaakkola at Scientific American.

“Mini-brains” — brain organoids grown from stem cells in the lab — are used to study the development of the human brain, though they are far more primitive than real brains. But researchers have reported a surprising finding: after around 9 months, even these basic organoids show changes in gene expression similar to that in human babies after birth. The results suggest that mini-brains may be useful for studying disorders that emerge after birth, rather than just prenatally, reports Kelly Servick at Science.

A lot of human neuroscience is about finding a signal in all of the background noise — identifying which regions are more active during a certain task, say, while ignoring the other activity that is going on in the brain. But what if there is useful information in all of that noise? At Wired, Elizabeth Landau reports on studies that have linked patterns of white noise within EEG data to aspects of behaviour and cognition.

Compiled by Matthew Warren (@MattBWarren), Editor of BPS Research Digest

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Our Brains “See” Beams Of Motion Emanating From People’s Faces Towards The Object Of Their Attention

By guest blogger Sofia Deleniv

Back in the 1970s, the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget discovered that, if you ask young children to explain the mechanics of vision as they understand them, their answers tend to reveal the exact same misconception: that the eyes emit some sort of immaterial substance into the environment and capture the sights of objects much like a projector.

Although this belief declines with age, it is still surprisingly prevalent in adults. What’s more, so-called extramission theories of vision have a long-running history dating all the way back to antiquity. The Greek philosopher Empedocles was amongst the first to suggest in the 5^th century BC that our ability to see must stem from an invisible fire beaming out of our eyes to interact with our surroundings. This view was subsequently endorsed by intellectual authorities like Ptolemy and Galen.

Now, a duo of researchers behind a recent publication in PNAS think they might have found an explanation for the intuitive appeal of extramission theories. According to their paper, this worldview might just be a reflection of the mechanisms that play out within our brains when we follow other people’s gazes and track where they pay attention. This is because, to carry out this process, our brains actually conjure illusory beams of motion emanating from other’s faces — a quirk of evolution with interesting consequences.

Scientists had already found signs that this was taking place. For instance, when people spend time looking at an image of someone gazing sideways at an object, they temporarily become slower at spotting subtle movement in that same direction. It is as if our brains treat the experience of seeing a pair of glancing eyes as an animated display of motion flowing towards the object of attention. This fatigues the brain region responsible for processing movement and renders it briefly “blind” to real motion along that same direction.

Shortly thereafter, an fMRI brain scanning study further deepened scientists’ suspicions. It showed that watching someone gazing at an object activated the motion-sensitive regions of our brains in a pattern that was remarkably similar to that triggered by the experience of viewing actual motion.

Tantalising as this evidence was, it was virtually impossible to conclude that this motion signal played any causal role in how we track people’s attention. Sceptical researchers suggested that the signal might simply reflect study participants imagining people reaching for the objects of their interest.

With this in mind, Arvid Guterstam and Michael Graziano — the Princeton University psychologists behind the recent PNAS publication — decided to set the causal record straight. They did this by testing whether meddling with the brain’s internal motion signal, using real (but subliminal) movement, could manipulate people’s perceptions of where someone was attending.

In their study, participants looked at a screen where two faces, set against a background of randomly moving black dots, gazed in the general direction of an object located at the center. They were asked to indicate which face seemed to be paying more attention to that item. But unbeknownst to them, these faces were actually mirror images, so participants unsurprisingly selected one or the other face with equal probability.

This changed when the researchers stealthily introduced a subtle signal in the background: a beam-shaped area emanating from the one of the faces, in which 30% of dots were made to drift coherently in the direction of the object. The manipulation was subtle enough that only seven out of over 650 participants were actually aware of it. And yet, it had a significant impact on how they attributed attention. On the trials where the subliminal beam of motion was flowing away from the left face, participants were 6% more likely to judge that face as paying more attention to the object — a significant deviation from their baseline indecisiveness.

Importantly, this motion-induced bias completely vanished when the dots moved in the opposite direction — i.e. from the object to the face. This suggests that our brains don’t fabricate motion signals for all interactions between objects in our surroundings. Rather, they reserve them for the social act of inferring the connection between someone’s gaze and the object of their attention. The byproduct of this, claim the study’s authors, is the inexplicable sensation that people’s eyes emit beams of immaterial substance. And even though this takes place outside the realm of our awareness, it might just be the driving force behind extramission theories’ historic and intuitive allure.

One almost cannot help but wonder whether this quirk of the brain also shapes how we intuitively think about mythical creatures. Indeed, aliens and robots with so-called “optic weaponry” have a propensity to pop up in works of science fiction, while medieval and classical-era tales are packed with beasts with killer glares (look no further than the basilisk, or the Gorgon Medusa, whose lethal gaze spurred the Greek hero Perseus to bring a reflective shield to his assassination attempt on the monster).

Of course, scientists will be hard pressed to prove that the historical and developmental appeal of extramission theories really is a reflection of the way our brains process gaze and attention. But these coincidences do raise interesting questions about the deep-seated role our fundamental neural mechanisms play in shaping our intuitions and imaginations — children and philosophers alike.

– Visual motion assists in social cognition

Post written by Sofia Deleniv for the BPS Research Digest. Sofia is a scientific writer whose work has appeared in magazines such as New Scientist and Discover Magazine. She holds a BA in Experimental Psychology and a PhD in Neuroscience from the University of Oxford, where she investigated how the brain processes sensations using a mix of electrophysiology and computer modelling. Ever enthusiastic about anything from genes and brains to animal behaviour, Sofia’s Twitter feed features the occasional update on her written work and other exciting bits of science.

At Research Digest we’re proud to showcase the expertise and writing talent of our community. Click here for more about our guest posts.

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Dolphins’ Personality Traits Are Surprisingly Similar To Our Own

By Emma Young

We’re all familiar with the “Big Five” model of personality, which measures the traits of conscientiousness, agreeableness, extraversion, neuroticism, and openness. But what drove the evolution of these personality domains? And how do animal personalities compare with ours? Answers to the second question can help to answer the first. And now a major new study of personality in bottlenose dolphins, published in the Journal of Comparative Psychology, has found that in some key ways, dolphin personality is like ours; in others, though, it is not.

The 134 dolphins studied by Blake Morton at the University of Hull and colleagues were all kept in captivity in 15 centres in eight different countries. Staff who had known the dolphins for at least a year rated each animal on a 49-item Dolphin Personality Questionnaire, adapted from a similar questionnaire for primates. Staff indicated the extent to which dolphins showed various traits, such as “exhibitionistic, flamboyant” (for dolphins who regularly try to attract visitors’ attention, say), “aggressive”, “sociable”, “erratic”, “playful”, “easygoing”, “suspicious”, and “stubborn”. Many of the dolphins were rated by two or more people, and the reasonable consistency between different people’s ratings for a single animal gave the team some confidence that these were accurate.

The team then analysed the data, and found that the traits clustered into four main groups, or domains: openness (a tendency to be active and explore the environment), disagreeableness (a tendency to be aggressive, jealous, despotic and obstinate), sociability (being friendly towards other dolphins and people), and “directedness”, characterised by consistency in behaviour, boldness, and low emotional arousal (this was like a blend of high conscientiousness and low neuroticism). In contrast to findings for chimpanzees or gorillas, a domain of “dominance” did not emerge. This domain is notably absent from human personality models, too, perhaps because neither dolphin nor human social groups feature very strong hierarchies, while chimp groups do, the team suggests.

As with orcas, California sea lions, mountain gorillas and bonobos, bottlenose dolphins don’t seem to have a domain of “neuroticism”, either. It’s been suggested that neuroticism is more likely to emerge in species that live in unpredictable environments (the theory is that neurotic individuals may be more prone to anxiety but also more vigilant when it comes to spotting dangers in their environment — and an unpredictable environment requires greater vigilance). But the data on dolphins, which, as the researchers note, evolved in relatively unpredictable environments, runs counter to this idea. The questionnaire didn’t include many neuroticism-related items, however. More work is now needed to explore the origins of neuroticism in other animals as well as us, the team observes.

It has been suggested that conscientiousness evolves in species that need to pay close attention to other individuals — to carefully watch another using a tool, and so learn how to use it, for example. Though dolphins do learn to use tools from other dolphins, the team did not find evidence that conscientiousness, in and of itself, is a clear domain of their personality. Something like human conscientiousness has been observed in Asian elephants, however. These elephants have highly manipulatable and useful trunks, which are similar in some ways to our hands. Perhaps, then, the need to pay close attention to the use of hands (or trunks) in manipulating objects and caring for infants is important for the evolution of conscientiousness, the team suggests.

What about the similarities between the personalities of dolphins and people, beyond the lack of a trait of dominance? Openness has been found in other intelligent species that also live in groups, such as chimpanzees, as well as humans (but not orangutans, which don’t live in stable social groups). The finding for dolphins fits with this pattern, and more work is now needed to explore the extent to which one or both of these two factors might have contributed to the evolution of this trait, the team writes. Agreeableness (or disagreeableness) is also shared, but as the traits that relate to sociability in dolphins are different to those seen in humans and other primates, more work is needed to explore this, too.

It will be fascinating simply to know more about other animals’ personalities, of course, but the team certainly also hopes that it will provide some broader insights into how our own human personality evolved: “Further work on cetaceans, other aquatic mammals and other vertebrates will lead to a better understanding of the evolutionary forces that unite and divide species that inhabit the surface and depths of our planet,” the team concludes.

– Personality structure in bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus).

Emma Young (@EmmaELYoung) is a staff writer at BPS Research Digest

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Credit- BPS Research Digest. Published by- Dr. Sabiha : www.drsabiha.blogspot.com

Belief In Conspiracy Theories Is Associated With Lower Levels Of Critical Thinking

By Emily Reynolds

Over the last few years, conspiracy thinking seems to have mushroomed — most visibly perhaps in the US, where QAnon supporters stormed the Capitol. Elsewhere, across the world, belief in coronavirus-related conspiracies have abounded; one large-scale survey conducted last year found that as many as one in five Britons believed the COVID-19 fatality rate may have been exaggerated.

We already know that certain factors make individuals particularly prone to conspiratorial thinking — their level of education, for example, or a desire to feel special. And a new study, published in Applied Cognitive Psychology, has identified another facet of cognition linked to conspiratorial beliefs: critical thinking. Anthony Lantian from Université Paris Nanterre and colleagues find that the higher the level of critical thinking, the lower the belief in conspiracy theories, potentially offering a path out of conspiratorial thinking for those particularly susceptible.

In the first study, 86 participants were asked to complete a conspiracy belief scale, indicating how much they agreed with statements such as “certain significant events have been the result of the activity of a small group who secretly manipulate world events”.

They then took part in a critical thinking activity, reading a letter to the editor of a newspaper arguing that overnight parking should be banned in a particular area. Participants were asked to respond to each paragraph of the letter, assessing the relevance of the argument and evaluating the letter as whole, then wrote their responses in the form of a letter to the editor. These letters were assessed by judges on various measures of critical thinking, such as identifying good arguments, seeing other explanations, and avoiding over-generalisation. The team found that the higher participants scored on the critical thinking task, the less they believed in conspiracy theories.

However, the relationship in the first study didn’t quite reach significance. So a second study replicated the first, this time with more participants; overall, 252 took part. As well as completing the conspiracy thinking measure and the letter evaluation task, participants also reported on their own critical thinking skills.

Again, those with high levels of critical thinking ability were less likely to believe in conspiracy theories. Interestingly enough, however, conspiracy-minded participants didn’t seem aware of their critical thinking skills — both those with high and low levels of conspiracy thinking rated themselves highly on critical thinking. This makes sense when you consider the narratives of many conspiracy theory movements, which often frame themselves as true critical or free thinkers, seeing the light where others cannot.

The results may be useful when designing interventions to combat conspiratorial thinking — but being careful about how these are framed would be crucial. If someone truly believes in a specific conspiracy theory, telling them they lack critical thinking skills is unlikely to help and may instead further entrench them in their beliefs, as researchers have highlighted in coverage of QAnon. The study is also correlational — we can’t say, based on these results, that lack of critical thinking is the reason people believe conspiracy theories.

Further research could look at why critical thinking might protect against conspiratorial thinking, as well as explore degrees of conspiratorial thinking. When does somebody tip from “healthy scepticism”, as the team puts it, into full-on conspiracy? Where is the line between critically engaging with what the media or politicians tell us, for example, and labelling everything as “fake news”? Though media coverage may focus on the “true believers” of particular conspiracy theories, the journey to such a staunch position often begins somewhere far more reasonable; tracking this journey could provide valuable insight.

– Maybe a free thinker but not a critical one: High conspiracy belief is associated with low critical thinking ability

Emily Reynolds is a staff writer at BPS Research Digest

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School Kids’ Memory Is Better For Material Delivered With Enthusiasm, Because It Grabs Their Attention

By Emma Young

Like countless other parents across the UK, I’m finding it pretty hard to maintain enthusiasm for my kids’ home-schooling lessons. Or muster it, for that matter. Yet we all know that when an instructor is enthusiastic, those sessions are more enjoyable — and we remember more. While this might be common knowledge, however, “the underlying mechanisms for the favourable effects of teacher enthusiasm are still largely unknown,” write Angelica Moè at the University of Padova, Italy, and her colleagues, in their new paper in the British Journal of Educational Psychology. The team therefore set out to better understand its power. And in a series of studies, they explored the idea that attention is key — that a more enthusiastic delivery grabs pupils’ attention more, which improves their memory for the material.

In an initial study, German children aged 8 to 12 listened to a trained instructor read two brief texts, one of which was a description of the characteristics of dragonflies, the other a story about a farmer. The instructor read with either low enthusiasm (a monotone voice, few or no body movements, fixed facial expression, eyes fixed on the text) or high enthusiasm (exuberant movements, excited and varied vocal delivery, shining eyes oriented towards the children, varied facial expressions). The team found that kids in the high enthusiasm condition not only reported enjoying both texts more — and smiled more — but were also spent more time looking at the instructor, suggesting they were more attentive.

Next, a total of 54 Italian pupils aged 9 to 11 underwent a very similar procedure, except that some had to complete a task that required their attention at the same time. (They had to spot and circle pictures of bells, which were among other small pictures on an A4 sheet). For the kids who were not given this extra task — i.e. those whose attention wasn’t already tied up — those in the high enthusiasm group showed better recall of the texts when questioned afterwards than those in the low enthusiasm group. However, the experimenter’s enthusiasm level had no impact on the bell-circlers’ recall, “thus showing that attention is among the underlying mechanisms explaining the positive effect of enthusiasm on recall,” the researchers write.

A final study using the same texts found that when a distracting task doesn’t require sustained attention — in this case, some kids were asked simply to touch corners of their desk in a clockwise direction, instead of circling bells — greater instructor enthusiasm did make for better later recall for the narrative text. This provides further evidence that an enthusiastic delivery style improves recall “only when a secondary task is not competing for the students’ attention”, the team writes.

So what are the implications of these findings? Some people — and some teachers — are naturally more enthusiastic than others. But it is possible to learn to be more demonstrative and engaging, both physically and verbally. So perhaps there’s a case for arguing that more naturally reserved teachers might be encouraged to consciously try to be more enthusiastic — but not necessarily all the time.

The results suggest that high enthusiasm is only important when the listeners aren’t simultaneously paying attention to something else. So while extra enthusiasm during a lecture could help students to enjoy the lecture more, pay more attention to the content and learn better, it would not help students engaged in a practical challenge, for example. “This is an important message for those who believe they should be enthusiastic at any cost, but who may suffer from a constant, effortful up-regulation of positive emotions,” the team notes. “Our results demonstrate that they may ‘economize’ their efforts of up-regulating their enthusiasm and do so only in situations where students are not engaged in tasks competing for their attention.”

Economise the efforts of up-regulation… Well, perhaps that’s something I can try at home.

– Displayed enthusiasm attracts attention and improves recall

Emma Young (@EmmaELYoung) is a staff writer at BPS Research Digest

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Mind-Reading And Lucid Dreaming: The Week’s Best Psychology Links

Our weekly round-up of the best psychology coverage from elsewhere on the web

In a fascinating sleep study, researchers have managed to “talk” to people in lucid dreams. Dreamers were given simple yes/no questions or asked to do basic arithmetic, and had to respond by moving their eyes and facial muscles. Several participants were able to correctly answer the questions in their sleep. The researchers hope that this new method will ultimately improve our understanding of sleep and consciousness, writes Claire Cameron at Inverse.

Psychologists have found problems in a number of papers linking violence in movies and video games to real-world aggression. Some of the papers have been retracted, reports Cathleen O’Grady at Science, but others live on, leaving researchers concerned about how they have influenced the field.

Public shaming has been around in one form or another for much of human history — but the internet has allowed it to occur at a scale never seen before. At Discover Magazine, Timothy Meinch explores the implications of this new era of shame and social media outrage.

We reported earlier this week on how to deal with feeling bored — and the surprising benefits that boredom can sometimes have. Over at BBC Worklife, Sara Harrison examines more findings about the “unique emotional state” that is boredom.

Every day we read other people’s minds, trying to understand what they are thinking. But this process is different from empathy, which involves understanding another’s emotions. Now a group of researchers have created a new scale to distinguish between the two, reporting their preliminary results at The Conversation.

Pausing before answering a question can make you seem like you are lying, reports Natalie Grover at The Guardian. Participants read about, listened to, or watched people responding in a range of scenarios, from everyday conversations to police interrogations. Slower responses were seen as less credible and sincere.

What’s it like to have no “mind’s eye”? At Psyche, Neesa Sunar describes her experience with aphantasia, which leaves her unable to mentally visualise her thoughts. Also check out our podcast on the condition from 2019.

Compiled by Matthew Warren (@MattBWarren), Editor of BPS Research Digest

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How To Deal With Boredom, Digested

By Emily Reynolds

One year into lockdown, and it’s safe to say a lot of us are very, very bored. We’ve watched all the boxsets we can stomach, developed (and subsequently ditched) a long list of increasingly esoteric hobbies, and have quite probably exhausted every possible walking route within several miles of our home. Yet the boredom persists.

Lockdown is, for most of us, an unusually boredom-inducing situation to be in, unable as we are to engage in many of the outside activities we would usually pass the time with. But boredom itself is common: as Camus rather pessimistically put it, “the truth is that everyone is bored”.

So how do you deal with boredom? And does being bored even come with some benefits? Here’s the research on boredom, digested.

Don’t look at your phone

The first thing many of us do when we feel even a twinge of boredom is reach for our phones, ready to endlessly scroll until we’re bored of that and switch to something else.

But one study suggests that, at least during working hours, smartphone use doesn’t actually do very much to relieve boredom. While phone use increased as workers became more bored, it also worked the other way around: participants were more bored after using their smartphone than they were when they started.

It could be that the act of switching tasks from work to using a phone depletes our mental resources, and the reward of a sneaky look at your phone isn’t able to counteract the additional cognitive load. Or perhaps looking at your phone can underline the tedium of the task you’re trying to escape from. Either way, the results suggest that clinging to our phones might not be the way to relieve our boredom.

Reframe the way you think about boredom

Nobody really likes being bored. But thinking about boredom not as a chore but as an opportunity for introspection might make it easier to bear.

In 2016, Tim Lomas, from the University of East London, purposefully made himself bored while on a long haul flight, making minute-by-minute notes about what he was thinking and feeling over the course of an hour. Rather poetically, he described his thoughts “emerging unbidden like fish appearing in an ocean”, and was “intrigued by how slippery, elusive and strange the mind was, a fleeting dance of vague ephemera”. He concluded that if people “were to regard boredom as a meditative experience, it may no longer be appraised as negative; indeed it may no longer even be boring.” York University’s Professor John Eastwood has similarly argued that boredom offers a chance to “discover the possibility and content of one’s desires”.

So with a bit of introspection, you could turn your boredom into something more meaningful.

Do something creative

In a 2014 study, Sandi Mann and Rebekah Cadman, both from the University of Central Lancashire, found that boredom actually increased creativity.

Participants were asked to either write something novel or do something undeniably tedious: copy numbers out of the telephone directory. All participants then completed a creative task, coming up with as many uses for two polystyrene cups as they possibly could. And those in the boring condition came up with far more uses than those in the non-boring condition.

So not only could indulging your creativity be a way out of boredom, boredom itself might also give your creativity a boost.

Get nostalgic

At the moment, a lot of us are probably feeling pretty nostalgic for a life before the pandemic. Could focusing on that nostalgia help our boredom, too?

In one 2013 paper published in Emotion, participants were first induced into high or low states of boredom by being asked to copy down either two or ten pieces of text about concrete mixtures. They then retrieved either a neutral or nostalgic memory. Those who were in high states of boredom before retrieving a nostalgic memory recorded feeling more nostalgic overall than those who were in low states of boredom. A follow-up experiment also found that nostalgia can actually counteract the effects of boredom, creating a sense of meaning in people’s lives.

Boredom often comes with a sense of existential emptiness, so reestablishing yourself as a person with meaning and purpose could help — and the way to do that could be through meditating on meaningful past times.

Let your mind wander

Mind wandering isn’t always a positive activity, particularly if you’re trying (and failing) to get on with an important task: mind wandering has been linked to poorer reading comprehension and worse memory, to use just two examples.

But, if you’re bored, it could offer some relief. According to one literature review, mind wandering can make boring tasks feel shorter, help us disengage from boring surroundings, and improve our moods while we’re doing something tedious. And as mind wandering has also been linked with increased creativity and problem-solving skills, there are other potential benefits too.

Tackle it head on

Schoolwork can be a serious cause of boredom — who doesn’t remember watching the clock tick slowly by as we sat in a class we hated? Luckily, this also makes school a good place to study boredom, and in 2011 one team explored a variety of different ways of dealing with boredom, focusing on avoidance (thinking or doing something unrelated to the boring situation) and “approach coping” (thinking or doing something that actively changes the boring situation itself).

The team grouped students’ responses to a boring maths lesson into three categories: “reappraisers” dealt with boredom by meditating on the value of mathematics and therefore changing their view of the situation; “criticizers” tried to act to improve the situation by suggesting changes to the teacher; and “evaders” tried to avoid boredom by occupying themselves with something else.

The reappraising group were the least bored overall, and also experienced the most positive outcomes when it came to emotions and motivation: they enjoyed maths more and experienced the lowest levels of anxiety. So, as Tim Lomas’ research also suggests, rethinking what boredom actually represents, rather than trying to avoid it altogether, might be the best way of ameliorating it long-term.

Emily Reynolds is a staff writer at BPS Research Digest

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What Makes For A “Meaningful” Death In Fiction?

By Emily Reynolds

Death can be a powerful narrative tool. We sob over the demise of a beloved character, cheer at the comeuppance of our favourite villain, or sit at the edge of our seats, shocked at deaths we didn’t see coming. Red Wedding, anyone?

All deaths are not created equal, however, and in a new study Kaitlin Fitzgerald from the State University of New York and team look at what makes certain fictional deaths so memorable. The team reports that although we find some deaths pleasurable — the long-awaited downfall of an antagonist, for example — it’s those we find meaningful that truly stick with us in the long-term.

Participants were first asked to think of a death scene from a narrative — film, TV, or other media. Those in the control condition then wrote about why the death they’d thought of was particularly memorable, while the other two groups were asked specifically to recall a death that was particularly “meaningful” or “pleasurable” and write about why they found it to be that way.

After writing about the scene, participants categorised the genre of the narrative they’d chosen, and indicated which emotions they felt in response to the scene. They also rated the extent to which they appreciated the narrative (how meaningful, moving or thought provoking they found it) and enjoyed it (how fun or entertaining it was, and whether they’d had a good time engaging with it). Finally, participants categorised the character as a hero, villain, anti-hero or anti-villain, rated the morality of the character and how much they deserved their death, and indicated how much they liked the character.

The results showed that “meaningful” and “pleasurable” deaths in fiction differ in key ways. Participants who had recalled a meaningful death were more likely to appreciate the narratives than those in the pleasurable condition, who were more likely to enjoy them. Those in the meaningful condition were also more likely to pick narratives from dramas or tear-jerkers, while participants in the pleasurable condition were more likely to pick deaths from the action genre, or from horrors or thrillers. The death of characters seen as moral, as heroes, or as less deserving of death were also more likely to be picked by those in the meaningful condition.

The relationship between morality and appreciation could be explored further, however. While the results suggest that the deaths of immoral characters are generally considered less meaningful, what about those whose morality is somewhat more blurred? Co-author Matthew Grizzard noted in an interview that, though both could very reasonably be considered villains, Blade Runner’s Roy Batty and Star Wars’ Darth Vader had come up several times as examples of meaningful deaths due to their redemption arcs. These moral grey areas could be explored further.

Overall, though, the study indicates that even when we’re watching a film or reading a book we can experience death as a meaningful and reflective experience. In particular, the team suggests that media deaths can help people process “disenfranchised” grief — grief for someone they don’t feel “allowed” to grieve for — with fictional characters acting as a conduit for repressed feelings. So while it might be fun when a schlocky Bond villain falls from the top of the Golden Gate Bridge or Samuel L. Jackson gets eaten by a shark, there are scores of other examples that speak to people on a level that goes far beyond entertainment, and that may even help them understand their own grief.

– Memorable, Meaningful, Pleasurable: An Exploratory Examination of Narrative Character Deaths

Emily Reynolds is a staff writer at BPS Research Digest

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