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Imaginary worlds are extremely successful. The most popular fictions produced in the last few decades contain such a fictional world. They can be found in all fictional media, from novels (e.g., Lord of The Rings and Harry Potter) to films (e.g., Star Wars and Avatar), video games (e.g., The Legend of Zelda and Final Fantasy), graphic novels (e.g., One Piece and Naruto), and TV series (e.g., Star Trek and Game of Thrones), and they date as far back as ancient literature (e.g., the Cyclops Islands in The Odyssey, 850 BCE). Why such a success? Why so much attention devoted to non-existent worlds? In this paper, we propose that imaginary worlds co-opt our preferences for exploration, which have evolved in humans and nonhuman animals alike, to propel individuals toward new environments and new sources of reward. Humans would find imaginary worlds very attractive for the very same reasons, and under the same circumstances, as they are lured by unfamiliar environments in real life. After reviewing research on exploratory preferences in behavioral ecology, environmental esthetics, neuroscience, and evolutionary and developmental psychology, we focus on the sources of their variability across time and space, which we argue can account for the variability of the cultural preference for imaginary worlds. This hypothesis can, therefore, explain the way imaginary worlds evolved culturally, their shape and content, their recent striking success, and their distribution across time and populations.

Human connection with nature is widely believed to be in decline even though empirical evidence is scarce on the magnitude and historical pattern of the change. Studying works of popular culture in English throughout the 20th century and later, we have documented a cultural shift away from nature that begins in the 1950s. Since then, references to nature have been decreasing steadily in fiction books, song lyrics, and film storylines, whereas references to the human-made environment have not. The observed temporal pattern is consistent with the explanatory role of increased virtual and indoors recreation options (e.g., television, video games) in the disconnect from nature, and it is inconsistent with a pure urbanization account. These findings are cause for concern, not only because they imply foregone physical and psychological benefits from engagement with nature, but also because cultural products are agents of socialization that can evoke curiosity, respect, and concern for the natural world.

A plethora of movies, television programs, podcasts, and online videos are dedicated to horror and terror, with fictional (e.g., zombies) and nonfictional (e.g., serial killing) themes. Morbid curiosity is a phenomenon where individuals attend to, or seek information about, horrid subjects, such as terror and death. Moreover, morbid curiosity has been tied with sexual curiosity and sensation seeking in past research, with men typically demonstrating more of each phenomenon. We hypothesized that interest in the topic of serial killers and other morbid academic and entertainment topics would be positively associated with morbid curiosity, sexual curiosity, and sensation seeking. Data supported these hypotheses with some notable gender differences. Viewed through the lens of evolutionary psychology, interest in horrific events, such as serial killing, may be a product of protective vigilance. We discuss these results, limitations, and future directions for research.

Although there is a large body of research assessing whether exposure to narratives boosts social cognition immediately afterward, not much research has investigated the underlying mechanism of this putative effect. This experiment investigates the possibility that reading a narrative increases social curiosity directly afterward, which might explain the short-term boosts in social cognition reported by some others. We developed a novel measure of state social curiosity and collected data from participants (N = 222) who were randomly assigned to read an excerpt of narrative fiction or expository nonfiction. Contrary to our expectations, we found that those who read a narrative exhibited less social curiosity afterward than those who read an expository text. This result was not moderated by trait social curiosity. An exploratory analysis uncovered that the degree to which texts present readers with social targets predicted less social curiosity. Our experiment demonstrates that reading narratives, or possibly texts with social content in general, may engage and fatigue social-cognitive abilities, causing a temporary decrease in social curiosity. Such texts might also temporarily satisfy the need for social connection, temporarily reducing social curiosity. Both accounts are in line with theories describing how narratives result in better social cognition over the long term.

Historical fiction is a broad genre. For simplicity, a novel fits the genre if it conforms to any of the following: contains fictional characters in documented historical situations, or real historical figures in imagined situations, or fictional characters occupying fictional situations in the context of a real historical period (Rodwell 2013). Tensions exist between academic history and historical fiction. The former purports to tell the truth through careful examination of primary documents, the latter has no such allegiance. Yet, we should not see these text types in opposition but as both necessary, even complementary, to the education of children. Historical fiction, as opposed to historical text, contains its own conventions as an entertaining agent of historical knowledge. By immersing primary school students in the genre, we are stimulating their imaginations by evocatively recreating the past. We know that the \"intertwining of emotion and intellect are, in essence, what drives literary engagement\" (Barone 2011, p. 3). Such engagement may be the tipping point, not just for leaping into reading for pleasure, but also for sparking an intellectual curiosity about the past.

In 1914, a Turkish novella depicting a young woman pressing a dagger to the throat of a bearded old man on its cover, with the title Bloody Fairy (Kanlı Peri), appeared for sale on bookshelves in the capital of the Ottoman Empire (Fig. 1). This relatively small book of fifty-four pages, with its price as low as 50 paras, was available to almost anybody who wanted to purchase and read it. Bloody Fairy was the first of a popular series of ten murder mysteries, National Collection of Murders (Milli Cinayat Koleksiyonu), written by Süleyman Sudi and Vassaf Kadri. On the back cover of the first book, the publishers promised readers that the series would tell matchless mysterious and murderous stories that “will arouse curiosity and excitement” (merak-aver ve heyecan-amiz ) among readers. This cover image must have been rather curious since popular crime fiction usually featured male protagonists as their central characters. In those books women were almost always the target, not the ones attacking men or committing crimes. A crime story featuring a female character leading a gang, not falling victim to a male criminal or being his lover, was not a figure that readers would expect. The preface of this book—and indeed the whole series—depicts countless oddities, strange events, enigmatic murders, and other crimes that had taken place in Istanbul during the prior twenty years. Many of these events were carried out by women. The authors write that although there was nothing astonishing in crimes committed because of a woman, women committing crimes was something never seen or heard of. Thus, they surely hoped that this extraordinary crime series about two female criminals would be a commercial success. On the back cover of the first book, they announced that the series would be published as two parts, comprising ten books each, and would be offered for sale as individual titles every Thursday. Unfortunately, their grand plans were never fulfilled; only the first ten books were published. Although the series is far from complete and we will never know about the authors’ plans to unfurl further crimes and mysteries, something wondrous eventually happened: these two authors, who were never among the canon of Ottoman Turkish literature, were discovered in the 2000s. In addition to National Collection of Murders, several of their other works have been transcribed and published. Süleyman Sudi and Vassaf Kadri, who yearned for popularity in the early 20th century, indeed became popular, albeit a century late.

Utilising emancipatory approaches to educational technology in higher education allows welcoming creative and artistic modes of inquiry. This article presents two methods, a virtual makerspace and a guided fantasy story that were applied in a project concerned with rewilding higher education pedagogy. It is argued that the methods encouraged curiosity and care to address diversity and inclusion. They afforded mindfulness of individual needs and welcomed explorations of new directions that challenged potential biases (gender, race, disability or professionality). The article illustrates how these two methods may offer a safe space to dream and imagine educational spaces.

Fictions with imaginary worlds such as Star Wars , Harry Potter , Game of Thrones or One Piece are achieving global success in industrialized societies. This paper investigates the historical trajectory and psychological underpinnings of this phenomenon. Study 1 ( N  = 51,169 novels and 50,928 movies) documents a clear increase in the prevalence and centrality of imaginary worlds from antiquity to the modern era. Study 2 demonstrates a historical shift toward imaginary worlds that are increasingly rich in detail, systematically structured, and internally plausible. Study 3 shows that economic development correlates with an increase in the popularity of imaginary worlds more than time does, suggesting that greater material security fosters curiosity and cultural engagement with cohesive imaginary worlds. This body of work illuminates an important aspect of modernity, namely the rise of imaginary worlds, and demonstrates that this could be explained as the results of the rise of curiosity among modern audiences.

A comparative analysis of Neil Gaiman's dark fantasy novella Coraline and its source of inspiration, Lucy Clifford's Victorian cautionary tale \"The New Mother,\" explores how the ominous dread related to the monstrous mother figure and the abjectification of the self are transformed into a \"funcanny\" experience in the postmodern rewriting. By relying on methodologies of corporeal narratology and cognitive poetics I study the embodied cognition of uncertainty during the child protagonists' psychic/physical confrontation with the unheimlich and the je ne sais quoi as forms of undecidability. The analysis maps linguistic attempts at formulating cognitive dissonance, tip-of-the-tongue phenomena, and subconscious thoughts. While Clifford uses narrative gaps to offer a metaimaginative insight into the catastrophic consequences of interpretive failures resulting from the misunderstanding of verbal and corporeal signs of disorientation, Gaiman's mind-reading instances of \"psychonarration\" reveal the troubled child's mental coping mechanisms, to celebrate infantile curiosity and fantasy in terms of gifts of empowerment, resilience, and empathy.

Binge-watching refers to the consecutive viewing of episodes of a fictional series, usually of the drama genre, in a single session. The approaches to its background, practice, and effects are diverse and controversial. Using a qualitative-exploratory approach analysed with Grounded Theory, this paper studies the experience of binge-watching users from data collected from a sample of 20 individuals combined with techniques such as group meetings, in-depth interviews and projective techniques. Results lead to the identification of two underlying patterns of behaviour associated with the consumption of dramatic content: planned binge-watching and unplanned binge-watching. Planned binge-watching is the intentional consumption of more than two consecutive episodes of a fictional series whose psychological effects are mainly gratification based on evasion. Planned series consumption has a socializing effect, especially among young people. Unplanned binge-watching is the unintentional and spontaneous chained viewing of more than two episodes of a fiction series. The viewing unit is each individual episode, linked to the next by the curiosity aroused by the plot. The psychological effects are gratification derived from evasion, followed by a feeling of guilt derived from the loss of control. The study concludes with the formulation of seven hypotheses for empirical verification, academic and professional implications, and future lines of research.