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"Curiosity Fiction."
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Question Boy meets Little Miss Know-It-All
A curious boy with non-stop questions meets a girl who seems to know all the answers.
Book
Why imaginary worlds? The psychological foundations and cultural evolution of fictions with imaginary worlds
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.
Journal Article
The Gruffalo's Child
The Gruffalo's Child goes out to find the Big Bad Mouse she has heard so much about.
Book
A Growing Disconnection From Nature Is Evident in Cultural Products
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.
Journal Article
Eeny, Meeny, Miney Mole
Three moles who live underground wonder what the world is like \"Up Above\" and one of them finally ventures upward to find out for herself.
Book
Interested in serial killers? Morbid curiosity in college students
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.
Journal Article
Just because
When a child is too full of questions about the world to go to sleep, her patient father offers up increasingly creative responses to his child's nighttime wonderings.
BOOK
Does reading about fictional minds make us more curious about real ones?
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.
Journal Article
IGNITING THE FIRE: USING HISTORICAL FICTION IN THE PRIMARY CLASSROOM
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.
Journal Article