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. 2017 Aug 1;12(8):1229-1240.
doi: 10.1093/scan/nsx069.

The emotional power of poetry: neural circuitry, psychophysiology and compositional principles

Eugen Wassiliwizky  1   2 , Stefan Koelsch  1   3 , Valentin Wagner  1 , Thomas Jacobsen  4 , Winfried Menninghaus  1
Affiliations

The emotional power of poetry: neural circuitry, psychophysiology and compositional principles

Eugen Wassiliwizky et al. Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. .

Abstract

It is a common experience-and well established experimentally-that music can engage us emotionally in a compelling manner. The mechanisms underlying these experiences are receiving increasing scrutiny. However, the extent to which other domains of aesthetic experience can similarly elicit strong emotions is unknown. Using psychophysiology, neuroimaging and behavioral responses, we show that recited poetry can act as a powerful stimulus for eliciting peak emotional responses, including chills and objectively measurable goosebumps that engage the primary reward circuitry. Importantly, while these responses to poetry are largely analogous to those found for music, their neural underpinnings show important differences, specifically with regard to the crucial role of the nucleus accumbens. We also go beyond replicating previous music-related studies by showing that peak aesthetic pleasure can co-occur with physiological markers of negative affect. Finally, the distribution of chills across the trajectory of poems provides insight into compositional principles of poetry.

Keywords: aesthetic reward; chills; neuroaesthetics; nucleus accumbens; piloerection; poetic language.

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Figures

Fig. 1.
Fig. 1.
Physiological correlates of chills, piloerection, and control time. Standardized amplitudes of (A) phasic electrodermal activity, (B) electromyographic corrugator activity, (C) heart rate and (D) electromyographic zygomaticus activity for self-selected (self) and experimenter-selected (exp) poems, for the first and second exposure (1,2). Note that whereas activity in chill phases tended to habituate for the second exposure, in piloerection phases it showed a sensitization effect. Bars with the same letter are not significantly different from each other at the 0.05 level. Solid downward arrows indicate significant habituation effects, solid upward arrows significant sensitization effects (the dashed upward arrow indicates a sensitization effect that reaches significance at the 0.1 level). Error bars indicate standard errors as estimated in a multilevel mixed-effect model. (Please note that for readability, we use a smaller scaling in C and D than in A and B.).
Fig. 2.
Fig. 2.
Event-related grand average, including standard error band for the skin conductance data for all single chills, aligned at the time point of the chill button press (0 s). The grey-shaded stripes indicate intervals that differ significantly from the baseline (−7 to − 6 s) in a running t-test with 0.5 s analysis windows (P < 0.05, FDR-corrected, Supplementary Table S2). Note that before the button press, a prechill deflection was observed. When contrasted with the chill, the prechill was associated with increased activity in the hedonic hotspot nucleus accumbens (Figure 3).
Fig. 3.
Fig. 3.
Whole-brain statistical parametric maps for two contrasts: Chills > Neutrals. Chill-specific activations recruit the mesolimbic circuitry of primary reward processing (caudate nucleus, putamen and mediodorsal thalamus). Prechills > Chills. A contrast of the prechill (reward anticipation) with the chill (reward attainment) shows significant bilateral activations during the anticipation in the ventral striatum, including the nucleus accumbens, thus emphasizing its role in preparing the aesthetic peak. (A, D, F) Sagittal views of the right hemisphere; (B, G) Axial views; (C, E, H) Coronal views (for readability, bilateral activations in B and C are labeled on only one side). SPMs are plotted on the average high-resolution anatomical image, displayed in neurological convention (left hemisphere on the left); the coordinates refer to MNI space; only clusters significant at P < 0.05, FWE-corrected, are shown.
Fig. 4.
Fig. 4.
Time course plots of neural activity in both NAcc clusters. The result pattern for both clusters shows a steep increase of NAcc activity 4 s before the button is pushed (thereby converging roughly with the beginning of the prechill in Figure 2), reaching its peak at the time point when the chill sets in, and a return to baseline during the time when the actual chill is experienced. Error bars indicate the standard error of the mean.
Fig. 5.
Fig. 5.
Chill distributions reveal closure effects. (A) Heat map of chills for one experimenter-selected poem with four stanzas (the other four poems are given in SM). Each row represents a line in the poem, each square represents a word. The coloring of the squares corresponds to the number of chills a word elicited across all participants in the first study. (B) Histograms of chill distributions across relative word positions for all 97 self-selected poems (‘Word | Poem’ means relative word position within the poem, with 1 representing the last word of the poem). Note that for both subsets, chills tend to cluster at the end of entire poems, single stanzas, and individual lines. In formal statistical analyses for both subsets, the number/occurrence of elicited chills per word could be robustly predicted by the relative word positions (Supplementary Table S5A and B).
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