Karin Kukkonen
Literature can make you feel and it can get you thinking, too. But how do you move from signs on a page to thoughts and feelings? And why does fiction sometimes feel more real than the world around us? My name is Karin Kukkonen, and together with my colleagues from the Literature, Cognition and Emotions Project, LCE for short, we will discuss these and other questions in the coming weeks. Today's guest is Thomas Schubert, Professor of Social Psychology at University of Oslo. Welcome, Thomas.
Thomas Schubert
Thank you. I look forward to talking research with you.
Karin Kukkonen
Your research, in particular, is about the emotional experience of being moved. Now, I guess this is a psychological phenomenon that probably everyone has experienced.
Thomas Schubert
I hope so. Yeah.
Karin Kukkonen
And that, I guess, we share with our listeners as well. And it occurs in many different contexts. What is your favorite example of being moved?
Thomas Schubert
I guess my favorite example is always the last one that really hit me strongly – and the last one, that hit me strongly, was a video I saw maybe a week or two ago. I saw it on Twitter. It was a Ukrainian soldier in his forties or fifties, and he and his fellow soldiers – they had just captured several very young Russian soldiers. And they were talking to them, and basically chiding them, and saying, 'Why did you come here? What are you doing here? You caused so much trouble and pain.' But they were talking to them like you would talk to little boys, that you would chide for doing something horrible and terrible. So, they were not aggressive at all. They were just sad and worn out, and talked to them like boys. And that's what it looked like. And I just teared up, because it's so against all the stereotypes. It was not like talking to an enemy, being aggressive. It was just being tired.
Karin Kukkonen
And it seems to take one aback, in a way, when you say such a thing.
Thomas Schubert
Yeah, exactly. When I remember it now, it reactivates my memory of it, and the emotion again, yeah, which is the magic, right?
Karin Kukkonen
Yeah. And of course the physical experience you talk about, tearing up.
Thomas Schubert
Yes.
Karin Kukkonen
So that seems to be a fairly complex constellation of elements, isn't it. You perceive something, you feel for them, but you also have your own emotional response, and it's physical and you can remember it. How do you study being moved as a psychologist?
Thomas Schubert
Hundred percent of it, at the moment, is asking people about it. And we ask them in various ways – we can really just talk about it, like we did now, and we always learn something new from that. We can also ask them in more formal ways, so that we have prepared scales, questionnaires...
Karin Kukkonen
What is a scale?
Thomas Schubert
A scale is a collection of questions that people answer on a rating scale, from, say, not at all – zero – to six, very much. And the scale that we use has about 20 of those questions, and then we take them together, create an average on them –and then we have a number, basically. But that's not always what we do, sometimes we just ask.
Karin Kukkonen
How can I imagine that situation where you just ask people – do you invite them to your lab, or what does it look like?
Thomas Schubert
Yeah, we often ask people something similar to what you just did. So, we ask them about the last time they were very moved, or we ask them about a specific topic. So, for instance, we asked American participants – while the Black Lives Matter protests were going on – whether they had been moved recently to tears about the Black Lives Matter movement events. And then they tell us, or either tell us a story or they write it down in a questionnaire. And then, we ask them more of these more standardized questions. Sometimes we play them video clips, or give them short parts of literature to read, and record their emotions. Sometimes we even play them video clips, and ask them to tell us what they feel and experience while they are watching those video clips. So these are the methods. We have done, in the past, sometimes physiological measurements, because many people argue that this is very crucial for emotions – and that is interesting, but it's not really necessary. So, asking about emotions is already great.
Karin Kukkonen
And then, when you have those answers, what do you do with them?
Thomas Schubert
So when we have the answers on those scales, then we calculate averages for groups of people, or relate to other variables. So, for instance, whether they are willing to support the Black Lives Matter movement... How it relates to other emotions like anger, for instance. With the video clips, where we ask while they're watching them, we look at which moment in particular in the video causes the big jump in emotions or make them tear up. And then we compare, yeah, different items, different questions, basically – whether people feel goosebumps at the same moment they feel tears running down their cheeks. So, it's a lot of statistics in the end, if you start collecting the numbers, and then it's usually you relating one variable to another.
Karin Kukkonen
And then you arrive at some kind of conclusion?
Thomas Schubert
Yeah, we are testing mostly theories, right? So, we came up with a theory, that we call Kamamuta theory, that tries to explain a large chunk of these being moved experiences. And that theory... As propositions or assumptions about what causes those emotions, mainly, who will feel it more strongly? How do all these bodily symptoms go together, and what comes out of it? What is the motivation that flows from this emotion?
Karin Kukkonen
So the examples, that we've talked about so far, are relatively everyday examples about being moved. Nevertheless, it's also an experience that has been often related to the aesthetic and the aesthetic experience, that is evoked by artworks. Do you think there is any significant difference between being moved at, let's say, reading War and Peace, or going to Rome and seeing a Caravaggio – between those aesthetic experiences, and between the social occasions where you can observe someone being moved, or do you think the similarities are actually more important than the differences?
Thomas Schubert
Yeah, that's such a great question, because we have been on a journey basically with that question. Our research into this started with those aesthetic experiences, with movies, with music. So, that's how we started to wonder, what is that emotion? How can we describe it? And I have come to believe, more and more, that these aesthetic phenomena, they are, well, not a side effect, but they are not the prototype of that emotion. So they are very interesting to study, but they are an outcome of something that has actually evolved – biologically and culturally evolved – for real interactions, between real people. So, this is how this emotion actually functions – between real people in real situations. And the fact that it also happens in appreciation of artwork, that's very interesting and needs to be explained. But it's not... it's probably not the prototype of this emotion.
Karin Kukkonen
And when you say prototype, do you mean that it's... you mentioned evolution briefly. Do you think... Because this is what precedes the creation of artworks, or do you say it because it is actually more typical than the way in which being moved appears in an artwork?
Thomas Schubert
I would say this emotion has the function of regulating social relations between people. And when I think of the prototype, it is something like one person proposing marriage to another, or a parent coming home and giving their child a puppy. Scenes like these, even something more about mourning or grieving between lovers or relatives, et cetera... So this is what causes this emotion really strongly. And then, we have those emotions in those situations to create a bond between people. That's for me, what I mean by prototype. And then it's really fascinating that we can also conjure up this emotion when we watch a movie, because we are not bonding with the people in the movie – not even with the people who created the movie. You're not bonding with Caravaggio the moment you watch his artwork... Well, maybe you are.
Karin Kukkonen
Well, maybe.
Thomas Schubert
... in spirit. Well, but it's not even with the artwork itself, right? So, there are more thoughts built around that, in the moment of appreciation of the artwork. But what happens is probably that you identify with characters in the movie, in the narrative, maybe even in the artwork, or that you perceive relations, or that you remember scenes from your own life, that have some association with what you are perceiving. And that is what is causing those being moved experiences to art.
Karin Kukkonen
Something that crossed my mind as you were talking is, of course, that – I mean – if we take the example of the Caravaggio in Rome, it's an altarpiece. So it is obviously an artwork, and it has an independent aesthetic value even if you do not happen to be Christian or Catholic, or whatever.
Thomas Schubert
Yeah.
Karin Kukkonen
And yet, I mean – it was commissioned for a very particular church, very particular place within the church. And I mean, if anyone knows about the emotional side of social bonding, I think it's the Catholic Church.
Thomas Schubert
Yes, you're totally right. So what you're experiencing, when you're looking at the painting, it's not just to see the painting fresh, basically like a blank slate, but, you know, basically the story that is depicted, right? You know the narrative and all its connotations. And yes, religion is built on being moved – because, again, religion wants to build on social bonds. It creates social bonds, it thrives on social bonds, and it uses art and ritual to create them.
Karin Kukkonen
Yeah. So these aspects of social practices and communal sharing, where we've arrived now, are – of course – important aspects of being moved, also in a model that you've developed. Do you think... And we've gotten as far as Caravaggio and the Catholic Church – but do you think also reading literature, may be a cultural, if we think of it as a cultural practice, may that also lead to similar effects on social bonding?
Thomas Schubert
Yeah, I think it does. The question is with whom, then, right? And I think it's usually with characters in those artworks, or what they stand for. I have to say, I haven't been that often moved by literature, but I can easily think of, I don't know, five, six, seven moments. And then, it's always that I have some association or bonding with those characters. So they stay in my mind afterwards. And maybe they stand for something in the real world as well. I'm not sure. I'm not always able to disentangle my own emotional processes. But we're all sensible to certain topics, to certain kinds of social relations, and especially these close relations. And then, when you see those being processed in art again, that's often the moment when you tear up.
Karin Kukkonen
Because it touches something inside you that... Yeah.
Thomas Schubert
It relates to relations that are really important to you, and that's why you are sensible to what is happening in art.
Karin Kukkonen
And may one think of, I mean, a book usually has more than one reader.
Thomas Schubert
Yeah.
Karin Kukkonen
Could there be a similar sort of sense of, yeah, social bonding over the, you know, we've read the same book and we've cried over the same pages...?
Thomas Schubert
If we know that, yes – I think that's quite likely. Experiencing any emotion together with others, and sharing that fact that you have the same emotion, I think, is powerful and creates associations between people. There's quite a bit of research on that, yeah. And we love to go to these situations where we have these experiences. This is why the cinema, as a place where you experience a movie together with others, is so powerful. Because you're in the same dark room, and you know that these other people have the same reaction.
Karin Kukkonen
Well, sometimes you can hear them.
Thomas Schubert
Exactly, yes. Well, yeah, that's how you know, right? Or you hear them not moving, for instance, in a horror movie. Yeah.
Karin Kukkonen
Yeah. So again, more generally, if we think of this social aspect, and being moved, what is the role then in a social context? So, we've talked about aesthetic experience and everyday experience, but there is of course also a social political level to all of this. We have examples of people crying when they hear the national anthem...
Thomas Schubert
Yes.
Karin Kukkonen
... And that can be a football game, or other occasions, or we have people commemorating the end of World War One. So this is all tied to, I guess, collective memory, perhaps more than anything else. But does being moved also contribute to, sort of, forwardmoving political action – and does it thereby have an effect in the here and now, beyond collective memory?
Thomas Schubert
Yeah, I think we see it regularly used by politicians – and really any type of social movement – to create those bonds, to create support and supporters. To move them to action. We have collected data on this in the two weeks before the 2016 election in the United States. We showed Americans advertisement clips, spots, short videos from both sides, from both candidates – Trump and Hillary Clinton at the time. And we saw that the clips that we selected, they moved both of these sides, but always much more the respective supporters than the other side. So, the Trump advertisements moved to tears Trump's supporters, and Clinton's ads moved her supporters to tears – the ones that were designed to do that. Of course, there were many others that were designed to create rather anger than being moved. But those clips existed on both sides. And they moved people, and they also increased, then, the support that they were telling us that they would like to give to their candidate. Yeah, so this has a real effect on supporters. Those clips work.
Karin Kukkonen
So, this difference that you've described – that there is an alignment with party lines, what you're being moved by and what you aren't – do you think that has something to do with, let's say, the way in which the clip is put together, the kind of situation that the Republicans would choose for their clips, as opposed to Democrats, or is it something...
Thomas Schubert
Yeah, the clips were very different in the content and in the relations they highlighted. Interestingly, they rather followed the same script – which we have seen in many movies and other advertisements – that try to cause that emotion, which is that... You introduce first a relation, then you show that it's in crisis, and then you suddenly reinvigorate it – or give the promise that it will be fulfilled or strengthened or intensified, in some way. So: introduce it, then a crisis and then suddenly a climax. And that is the moment when people tear up. And these advertisements... both sides followed that script, but they filled it with very different content. Clinton's campaign filled it with LGBTQ relations, for instance, and saying they're supporting gay marriage, while Trump spots, they had some allusion to past American greatness, and actually alluded to workers' rights and unemployment in the steel industry. And then promised the return of those jobs, et cetera.
Karin Kukkonen
So you could write a kind of sociological analysis on the basis of what people tear up over?
Thomas Schubert
Yeah, Yeah, I think you could. Yeah.
Karin Kukkonen
Coming back to this issue of political action, is there something in being moved that then, yeah, moves you into actually doing something about it, or is it a more passive, emotional state?
Thomas Schubert
I think it bonds you to other people, and then the effects of that – on actual action – depend on the content. But that can be really anything. It can be as extreme as sacrificing your life for another person, right? But it can also be very mild, or smaller – can be a donation, can be any kind of support, can be as simple as going home and call your mom. So anything that is necessary for that relation, then.
Karin Kukkonen
So you do something to, yeah, highlight or mend a social bond that is important to you?
Thomas Schubert
Yes. Or just act in accordance with it – feed your children. Yeah.
Karin Kukkonen
I imagine that's not something you should tear up over.
Thomas Schubert
Well, that is the outcome of strengthening these kinds of relations, right? And then the relations, they... They have their own norms and rules – and that is what we do. But I think people can easily tear up over children being fed. Again, if you identify with them, and then you see that they are in crisis or starving, and then seeing food being delivered – that can be a very powerful and moving scene. Actually anything that is about food – we have found – can easily be moving, because it connects bodies, right?
Karin Kukkonen
That's right. And it's a question of bonding, as well, if you share a meal together.
Thomas Schubert
Yes. Anything that connects bodies – hugs, touching, feeding. So, one of my favorite short clip, that moves people, that we use all the time in experimental research, is about sharing money. But it also has elements of food sharing in it, and I think those are really important. So you see it often on the sides, basically, the bodily contact, the food sharing.
Karin Kukkonen
Yeah, offering food.
Thomas Schubert
And even the clip, that I mentioned in the very beginning, the one about the soldiers. There is one moment of the old guy pulling the hat, again, down – the hat of the Russian soldier. So he basically clothes him. He puts the hat on again, which is a moment of body contact.
Karin Kukkonen
And care, in a way.
Thomas Schubert
Yes, exactly.
Karin Kukkonen
Yeah. So we've talked about many different elements of the being moved experience – physical, social, aesthetic. And you're studying this quite systematically. So do you think being moved is something that could be engineered in a way? I mean, we talked about election advertisements, which I guess are social engineering in a way – but of course also the example of Caravaggio in this church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome would be made to move.
Thomas Schubert
Yes, absolutely. The word engineered sounds very accusatory, but I think everybody who comes up with a ritual, or develops a ritual further, is basically doing exactly that. So rituals in religious services are often engineered, in that term, to bond people – to cause being moved.
Karin Kukkonen
Or maybe designed or made or...?
Thomas Schubert
Yeah, maybe that's a nicer, kinder term for the same thing. Yes. And again, when you go back to the Catholic Church, the feeding is the central part, right? You are fed the body of Christ, literally.
Karin Kukkonen
Which is the ultimate bond, both to other members of the church and the divine, obviously.
Thomas Schubert
Yes. Yeah.
Karin Kukkonen
If we go back to a literary example for this – let's say... let's call it design for getting moved – one of the most famous sort of tearjerkers in literary history is the death of Little Nell.
Thomas Schubert
Hmm.
Karin Kukkonen
I don't know if you've read it. It's in Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop, where little Nell – who was an angel-like creature of perfection – dies in unfortunate circumstances. And her grandfather, with whom she lives – and he's the owner of the old curiosity shop – he can't believe that she's dead. He just, 'Oh, she's just sleeping. And she's just been really tired'. So for days and days, he doesn't realize – or he seems not to realize – what has just happened. So this death of Little Nell inspired Oscar Wilde to say, that one must have a heart of stone – I'm citing Wilde – one must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.
Thomas Schubert
Yes, so he wasn't very happy or amused – or moved.
Karin Kukkonen
Well, I guess it was his point – that it actually doesn't need to move everyone, I mean...
Thomas Schubert
It didn't move him, apparently.
Karin Kukkonen
It didn't move him. And I mean, he made quite a... it was part, I guess, of his posture as a sort of dandy and intellectual, that these sort of pedestrian emotions do not touch him. That he is somehow aloof from that. So, my question would be, are there actually people who cannot be moved? Is this something that, yeah, one can escape from, or is being moved on experience that catches up with you sooner or later?
Thomas Schubert
Yeah. I should have a really good answer to that, because we have now data from, I don't know, almost 10 000 people. But of course, we are always somewhat restricted to what we show them, or what we ask them. So yes, in our data, there are many people who are not moved at all by what we show them. But they might be moved by something else. What we do know is that, when we try to relate how much they are moved to other variables that we can measure, for instance, with questionnaires about their personality, we do see that the more psychopathic traits somebody has, the less they are moved – by what we typically use as a stimuli. So, that kind of makes sense to me. We haven't done more systematic research on that, but that is what the data at the moment say. My guess is that, apart from the real strong psychopaths, almost everybody can be moved – because we all have this need and motivation to form these close social bonds. And then, it's only the question whether – with the artwork or whatever you're using – you get to the right point, to the right bond that somebody wants to form. And I saw a quote from Wilde, where he described that he got very moved from playing Chopin. So he wasn't immune to being moved, completely.
Karin Kukkonen
It's just that Dickens didn't quite hit the spot.
Thomas Schubert
Yeah, and I can kind of understand that. It doesn't really hit it for me either. It's too melodramatic. And then, I have the reflex of pulling back and saying, like, I don't want to... I don't know. Yeah, I feel then manipulated, which is maybe wrong, because it was a different time, a different period of art. And I don't think it felt manipulating or cheesy to the people at the time, but it does now to me. And then I have kind of a block to feel it – or to let myself feel it.
Karin Kukkonen
Yeah. So there is a level of... Yeah, you can modulate it?
Thomas Schubert
Yeah, I think so. I mean, we are pretty good... like, adults are pretty good at regulating our own emotions, except when it's, I don't know, strong fear or strong anger. So yes, I think many people are actually quite good – or become quite good – at regulating being moved, because they have to, because tears have such a bad reputation. Like, you try typically to avoid crying in public. And why? Because there is this stereotype that people who do are weak, and especially men are not supposed to show that. Which is, in my view, a misunderstanding of what tears are. They are exclusively associated with sadness. So typically, when you see somebody cry, you think they are crying out of sadness. The fact that they are also associated with being moved – which is not sadness, it's something different – that is much less in the public mind, so to speak. And that's why we are, especially we men, are trained and educated not to cry. This is what small boys are told. Boys don't cry. Which is kind of sad.
Karin Kukkonen
You could cry over that.
Thomas Schubert
Exactly.
Karin Kukkonen
I'm sure there is a YouTube video somewhere on that. So, I guess the – what do you call it – the take home message, then, is that we need to talk more about being moved in a public context.
Thomas Schubert
Yeah, talk about it – and allow ourselves to do it, right? So, crying over a beautiful piece of art shouldn't be seen as weak. Or bad, or whatever.
Karin Kukkonen
Well, I guess it also means that, you know, you have the strength to let that happen to you.
Thomas Schubert
Yeah. Which still implies that... it means you are vulnerable, right? But maybe we can even let go of that idea.
Karin Kukkonen
Vulnerability.
Thomas Schubert
That it signals vulnerability. Because I think it doesn't. Tears... I think tears signal a wish to bond, and to get into a close relation. And that's not vulnerable, is it?
Karin Kukkonen
I guess that is the opposite of vulnerable. If you're, you know, ready to form a bond, then you need to have a sense of, yeah, security, in a way...
Thomas Schubert
Yes.
Karin Kukkonen
... Trust. And that... it's actually a sign of strength?
Thomas Schubert
Yeah. It's at least in the situation of being moved. Of course, like the tears that come when you are frustrated and sad, terrified and anxious – those are also tears that signal that you want a social bond. But, in that case, you want somebody who helps you, who protects you, right? So, the tears do the same. The question is in what state you are. But in both cases, they signal that you want and need a social bond.
Karin Kukkonen
And I guess, to a certain extent then, the bodily posture that... I'm thinking of sort of stereotypical examples...
Thomas Schubert
Yeah, of what it looks like?
Karin Kukkonen
So yeah, the way in which... whether you open the body or whether you close – and I realized that our listeners can't see how we're moving our bodies here – yeah, that does signal, I guess, what you've described with the two ways of inviting a social bond.
Thomas Schubert
Yeah, yeah. Offering one or needing one.
Karin Kukkonen
In order to bond further with the listeners, I'd like to invite you to give us some reading recommendations. I guess Little Nell did not make the list.
Thomas Schubert
I'm afraid it did not, I have to say so. I went over the books that I have read in the last year or so... To my shock, I realized I haven't finished many of them. I'm kind of a remorseless stopper of reading books, if I don't like them. But what I really liked, I loved, I brought. The first one is from Kim Stanley Robinson. It's a science fiction novel, it's called The Ministry of the Future. No, sorry, The Ministry for the Future. It's a very bleak, yet somewhat hopeful science fiction novel, set about two dozen, three dozen years in the future. It describes how we cope with climate change and its horrible fallout. It has probably the worst opening sequence I have ever read in a novel, because it's devastating. It describes a heat wave in India and how people die. And I read this – and then experiencing the heat wave over the summer... Like every time, I just thought back to that novel. And I get goosebumps now, talking about it. It's worth reading. It's also strangely written, in many ways, because you never really get to know many of the characters – which I guess is a stylistic choice that I don't understand – but it feels a bit disjointed in many moments, which is maybe what he wanted to cause. The second one is the novel I'm reading right now, which is from the Nobel Prize winner in literature, Abdulrazak Gurnah. Now, I hope that's how you pronounce it. The novel is called Paradise. I actually read it in the German translation, which is a strange choice, because it was written in English. But I really wanted to read a German novel again. So I'm reading it in German.
Karin Kukkonen
Do you feel there is a difference in how close you get to a novel, whether you read it in German, your native tongue, or in English?
Thomas Schubert
I do. Yes, I do. And I kind of allow it. So usually, I want to read the novel in English if it was written in English. With this one I thought, it's okay, because I really wanted to. And because it describes German colonialism in South West Africa. So it has actually German in it. So I thought, that's okay. And the last one, that I read in the spring is... it's not a novel. It's a very long essay by Rebecca Solnit. It's called Orwell's Roses. So it's not quite a biography of Orwell, but it describes many scenes from his life, and ties it really artfully to many, many other topics. So, she also talks about climate change. She writes about nature, how we experience nature, about how nature is made into art, basically. And she has this unique style of writing almost dreamlike essays, that are very... sometimes you quite don't quite know where she is going, but then she always manages to weave it back together. So I really like her style, yeah. Those are the three books I brought.
Karin Kukkonen
Thank you. Thank you for sharing your recommendations. And thank you for this wonderful conversation on everything between tears and goosebumps.
Thomas Schubert
Oh, thanks. Thanks to you, Karin.