Evaluation Topics: Emotional Immersion
Evaluating Emotions & Sentiment
Two important factors can be distinguished in evaluating emotional immersion: affective intensity and paradox of empathy.
Affective Intensity
Below is an excerpt from Narrative as Virtual Reality 2, Marie-Laure Ryan:
The following types of emotion are considered to be conductive to immersion on an emotional level. Note that a given emotion, as identified by a name, can occupy several categories. They are listed here in increasing order of affective intensity:
Subjective reactions to characters and judgments of their behavior. These include primarily like and dislike but also admiration, contempt, pity, amusement, Schadenfreude, and exasperation (when good things happen to bad characters). Subjective reaction involves a distanced evaluation rather than identification with the characters. Feeling admiration or contempt for characters can be explained by counterfactual reasoning, such as, “if an x behaved like p, I would admire x,”
Empathetic emotions, that is, emotions felt not for oneself but for others. Suzanne Keen defines empathy as “a spontaneous, vicarious sharing of affect” and as “feeling what we believe to be the emotions of others.” Empathetic emotions fall into the two broad categories of feeling: Sad or Happy for characters. Although they may be described in finer shades, such as pity, grief, and relief
Emotions felt for oneself, not for others, such as fear, horror, disgust, and sexual arousal.
The strongest feelings of empathy occur when bad things happen to likable characters, but readers do not experience grief for fictional characters in the same way they experience it for real people. They do, and do not, feel sorry for them. How can one get out of this impasse?
Paradox of Empathy
"We have emotions concerning fictional situations. We must believe in the propositions that describe the fictional situation. We do not believe the propositions than describe the situations represented in fiction." - Gregory Currie, Nature of Fiction.
Empathy and Compassion
Empathy: you experience empathy when you actually feel the suffering of someone else.
Compassion: you feel compassion when you care about someone and want their pain to go away, without suffering yourself.
These can go together, but research shows that empathy and compassion are different and even activate different parts of the brain.
A Theory of Narrative Empathy (excerpt) The Emotion Thesaurus The Emotion Thesaurus highlights 75 emotions and lists the possible body language cues, thoughts, and visceral responses for each.
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