The Narrative Brain: Hunting Unnamed Emotions
How do narratives shape our thinking? What makes stories so captivating? I suggest that story thinking allows us to solve the problem of sharing real and imaginary experiences. The first part of the talk will propose a model of narrative cognition that focuses on narrative emotions. I will present empirical evidence that a set of emotions operates as anchors of stories that potentially attract us to stories, that reward us for our engagement, and that also signal an end of the engagement. In the second part, I will take these ideas further and consider complex narrative emotions for which we lack proper emotion names, but that function as narrative emotions as described above. An example of such an emption is comeuppance of characters (the punishment of bad guys). I will suggest a list of such novel emotions. I will draw examples from both fiction (Grimm fairy tales) and real-life accounts.
Bio
Fritz Breithaupt teaches German literature, cognitive science, and psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. He works on narrative, empathy, and aesthetics in both empirical ways and by means of close readings of the European literary traditions. Among his publications are: The Narrative Brain (2025), The Dark Sides of Empathy (2022) and One Time is never enough: How we Make Experiences (forthcoming 2026). He directs the Experimental Humanities Lab.
Read more about the Carolyn Engel Luebeck Lecture series at Ohio State.