Raymond A Mar
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 110286 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Raymond A Mar |
| PRENOMES | Raymond A |
| SOBRENOME | Mar |
| ASSINATURA | MAR R A |
| AFILIAÇÕES | York University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5307-7031 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 28 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 46 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 28 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2006 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 3 |
Judgements of Propaganda Near and Far
Western media often critiques foreign governments for their propaganda efforts while ignoring similar efforts by their own government. We predicted that individuals would demonstrate a similar bias. An experiment with 282 Canadian participants revealed just the opposite: when asked overtly, participants judged a video attributed to their own government to be more like propaganda than identical foreign media. When asked covertly (e.g., about the v…
Contagion and character
Tension in attention
Weird reactions to weird Twitter
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 o…
Select your character
In this study, we investigate whether avatar choice is based on an alignment between perceptions of that avatar and one’s own psychological needs. Data are not publicly available but will be provided upon request
Multilingualism and mentalizing abilities in adults
Bilingual children have better Theory-of-Mind compared to monolingual children, but comparatively little research has examined whether this advantage in social cognitive ability also applies to adults. The current study investigated whether multilingual status and/or number of known languages predicts performance on a mentalizing task in a large sample of adult participants. Multilingualism was decomposed based on whether English is the first lan…
The textual features of fiction that appeal to readers
In two studies we assessed whether simple surface-level textual features of fictional works predict their appeal to readers. Specifically, we focused on the potential role of emotional valence and arousal, the presence of affective themes (i.e., sex, religion, and death), and word concreteness and frequency. In Study 1, we compiled a corpus of 1,471 short stories posted to a creative writing website and along with ratings of these stories by read…
Memory and comprehension of narrative versus expository texts
We acquire a lot of information about the world through texts, which can be categorized at the broadest level into two primary genres: narratives and exposition. Stories and essays differ across a variety of dimensions, including structure and content, with numerous theories hypothesizing that stories are easier to understand and recall than essays. However, empirical work in this area has yielded mixed results. To synthesize research in this are…
Zahra or Zoe, Arjun or Andrew? Bicultural baby names reflect identity and pragmatic concerns
Baby naming among ethnic minorities is a complex cultural decision, reflecting both identity and pragmatic concerns. Implications for studies of acculturation and identity, and future research directions are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)
Adult attachment and engagement with fictional characters
Adult attachment influences how people engage with stories, in terms of how immersed or transported they become into these narratives and the tendency to form close bonds with characters. This likely stems from the ability of stories and story characters to provide interpersonal intimacy without the threat of rejection. In Study 1, we expand on this work to examine how attachment relates to two previously uninvestigated aspects of character engag…
Evaluating whether stories can promote social cognition
Stories have long been theorized to influence how we perceive our social world and our peers. Empirical research on this topic has begun to grow, with many studies exploring how stories and social cognition relate, across a range of different approaches. In order to structure past work and guide future investigations, this article presents a research framework that formalizes how, when, and why engagement with stories might promote social cogniti…
Adult attachment and transportation into narrative worlds
Adult attachment affects close bonds, including bonds with fictional characters, but does it also influence the level of engagement with fictional worlds? This article aims to build on previous research on how attachment relates to narrative transportation. In Study 1, attachment anxiety, but not attachment avoidance, predicted a greater tendency to become transported into narratives, even after controlling for broader personality traits related …
Can Differences in Word Frequency Explain Why Narrative Fiction Is a Better Predictor of Verbal Ability than Nonfiction
Individuals who read more tend to have stronger verbal skills than those who read less. Interestingly, what you read may make a difference. Past studies have found that reading narrative fiction, but not expository nonfiction, predicts verbal ability. Why this difference exists is not known. Here we investigate one possibility: whether fiction texts contain more of the words typically evaluated by verbal ability measures compared to nonfiction te…
Blurred world view
Previous studies suggest that distorted representations of reality on television can lead to distorted perceptions of reality among viewers. In this study, 322 individuals in Austria reported their weekly television consumption and whether they believe that there is active practice of capital punishment in Austria, which has been abolished since 1968. The more television participants watched, the more likely they mistakenly believed that there is…
Do I amuse you? Asymmetric predictors for humor appreciation and humor production
Psychological entropy
Entropy, a concept derived from thermodynamics and information theory, describes the amount of uncertainty and disorder within a system. Self-organizing systems engage in a continual dialogue with the environment and must adapt themselves to changing circumstances to keep internal entropy at a manageable level. We propose the entropy model of uncertainty (EMU), an integrative theoretical framework that applies the idea of entropy to the human inf…
How daydreaming relates to life satisfaction, loneliness, and social support
The Hierarchical Structure of Childhood Personality in Five Countries
Childhood personality is a rapidly growing area of investigation within individual differences research. One understudied topic is the universality of the hierarchical structure of childhood personality. In the present investigation, parents rated the personality characteristics of 3,751 children from 5 countries and 4 age groups. The hierarchical structure of childhood personality was examined for 1‐, 2‐, 3‐, 4‐, and 5‐factor models across count…
Emotion and narrative fiction
Emotions are central to the experience of literary narrative fiction. Affect and mood can influence what book people choose, based partly on whether their goal is to change or maintain their current emotional state. Once having chosen a book, the narrative itself acts to evoke and transform emotions, both directly through the events and characters depicted and through the cueing of emotionally valenced memories. Once evoked by the story, these em…
The Neural Bases of Social Cognition and Story Comprehension
A great deal of research exists on the neural basis of theory-of-mind (ToM) or mentalizing. Qualitative reviews on this topic have identified a mentalizing network composed of the medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate/precuneus, and bilateral temporal parietal junction. These conclusions, however, are not based on a quantitative and systematic approach. The current review presents a quantitative meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies perta…
Literary arts and the development of the life story
Throughout adolescence, children begin to develop their life story: a coherent account of their experiences and selfhood. Although the nature of this development is still being uncovered, one promising direction for research is the examination of factors that could encourage life story development. Here the authors explore the idea that exposure to the literary arts (i.e., poetry and fictional literature) might promote the formation of a coherent…
The Common Neural Basis of Autobiographical Memory, Prospection, Navigation, Theory of Mind, and the Default Mode
A core brain network has been proposed to underlie a number of different processes, including remembering, prospection, navigation, and theory of mind [Buckner, R. L., & Carroll, D. C. Self-projection and the brain. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11, 49–57, 2007]. This purported network—medial prefrontal, medial-temporal, and medial and lateral parietal regions—is similar to that observed during default-mode processing and has been argued to repre…
The Toronto Empathy Questionnaire
To formulate a parsimonious tool to assess empathy, we used factor analysis on a combination of self-report measures to examine consensus and developed a brief self-report measure of this common factor. The Toronto Empathy Questionnaire (TEQ) represents empathy as a primarily emotional process. In 3 studies, the TEQ demonstrated strong convergent validity, correlating positively with behavioral measures of social decoding, self-report measures of…
Exploring the link between reading fiction and empathy
Readers of fiction tend to have better abilities of empathy and theory of mind (Mar et al., Journal of Personality 74: 1047–1078, 2006). We present a study designed to replicate this finding, rule out one possible explanation, and extend the assessment of social outcomes. In order to rule out the role of personality, we first identified Openness as the most consistent correlate. This trait was then statistically controlled for, along with two oth…
Bookworms versus nerds
Evaluating whether stories can promote social cognition
Stories have long been theorized to influence how we perceive our social world and our peers. Empirical research on this topic has begun to grow, with many studies exploring how stories and social cognition relate, across a range of different approaches. In order to structure past work and guide future investigations, this article presents a research framework that formalizes how, when, and why engagement with stories might promote social cogniti…
Adult attachment and engagement with fictional characters
Adult attachment influences how people engage with stories, in terms of how immersed or transported they become into these narratives and the tendency to form close bonds with characters. This likely stems from the ability of stories and story characters to provide interpersonal intimacy without the threat of rejection. In Study 1, we expand on this work to examine how attachment relates to two previously uninvestigated aspects of character engag…
Do I amuse you? Asymmetric predictors for humor appreciation and humor production
Can Differences in Word Frequency Explain Why Narrative Fiction Is a Better Predictor of Verbal Ability than Nonfiction
Individuals who read more tend to have stronger verbal skills than those who read less. Interestingly, what you read may make a difference. Past studies have found that reading narrative fiction, but not expository nonfiction, predicts verbal ability. Why this difference exists is not known. Here we investigate one possibility: whether fiction texts contain more of the words typically evaluated by verbal ability measures compared to nonfiction te…
Blurred world view
Previous studies suggest that distorted representations of reality on television can lead to distorted perceptions of reality among viewers. In this study, 322 individuals in Austria reported their weekly television consumption and whether they believe that there is active practice of capital punishment in Austria, which has been abolished since 1968. The more television participants watched, the more likely they mistakenly believed that there is…
Self‐Liking and Self‐Competence Separate Self‐Evaluation From Self‐Deception
The similarities between measures of self‐evaluation and self‐deception are reviewed, and a method for discriminating between them is proposed, using personality profiles and relations to ability and achievement. Across two samples, the Rosenberg Self‐Esteem Scale (RSES) and Tafarodi's measures of self‐evaluation were used to demonstrate that the RSES and Self‐Liking are more similar to Self‐Deceptive Enhancement than is self‐competence. Further,…
Bookworms versus nerds
The Function of Fiction is the Abstraction and Simulation of Social Experience
Fiction literature has largely been ignored by psychology researchers because its only function seems to be entertainment, with no connection to empirical validity. We argue that literary narratives have a more important purpose. They offer models or simulations of the social world via abstraction, simplification, and compression. Narrative fiction also creates a deep and immersive simulative experience of social interactions for readers. This si…
The Common Neural Basis of Autobiographical Memory, Prospection, Navigation, Theory of Mind, and the Default Mode
A core brain network has been proposed to underlie a number of different processes, including remembering, prospection, navigation, and theory of mind [Buckner, R. L., & Carroll, D. C. Self-projection and the brain. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11, 49–57, 2007]. This purported network—medial prefrontal, medial-temporal, and medial and lateral parietal regions—is similar to that observed during default-mode processing and has been argued to repre…
The Toronto Empathy Questionnaire
To formulate a parsimonious tool to assess empathy, we used factor analysis on a combination of self-report measures to examine consensus and developed a brief self-report measure of this common factor. The Toronto Empathy Questionnaire (TEQ) represents empathy as a primarily emotional process. In 3 studies, the TEQ demonstrated strong convergent validity, correlating positively with behavioral measures of social decoding, self-report measures of…
Exploring the link between reading fiction and empathy
Readers of fiction tend to have better abilities of empathy and theory of mind (Mar et al., Journal of Personality 74: 1047–1078, 2006). We present a study designed to replicate this finding, rule out one possible explanation, and extend the assessment of social outcomes. In order to rule out the role of personality, we first identified Openness as the most consistent correlate. This trait was then statistically controlled for, along with two oth…
Emotion and narrative fiction
Emotions are central to the experience of literary narrative fiction. Affect and mood can influence what book people choose, based partly on whether their goal is to change or maintain their current emotional state. Once having chosen a book, the narrative itself acts to evoke and transform emotions, both directly through the events and characters depicted and through the cueing of emotionally valenced memories. Once evoked by the story, these em…
The Neural Bases of Social Cognition and Story Comprehension
A great deal of research exists on the neural basis of theory-of-mind (ToM) or mentalizing. Qualitative reviews on this topic have identified a mentalizing network composed of the medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate/precuneus, and bilateral temporal parietal junction. These conclusions, however, are not based on a quantitative and systematic approach. The current review presents a quantitative meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies perta…
Literary arts and the development of the life story
Throughout adolescence, children begin to develop their life story: a coherent account of their experiences and selfhood. Although the nature of this development is still being uncovered, one promising direction for research is the examination of factors that could encourage life story development. Here the authors explore the idea that exposure to the literary arts (i.e., poetry and fictional literature) might promote the formation of a coherent…
Psychological entropy
Entropy, a concept derived from thermodynamics and information theory, describes the amount of uncertainty and disorder within a system. Self-organizing systems engage in a continual dialogue with the environment and must adapt themselves to changing circumstances to keep internal entropy at a manageable level. We propose the entropy model of uncertainty (EMU), an integrative theoretical framework that applies the idea of entropy to the human inf…
How daydreaming relates to life satisfaction, loneliness, and social support
The Hierarchical Structure of Childhood Personality in Five Countries
Childhood personality is a rapidly growing area of investigation within individual differences research. One understudied topic is the universality of the hierarchical structure of childhood personality. In the present investigation, parents rated the personality characteristics of 3,751 children from 5 countries and 4 age groups. The hierarchical structure of childhood personality was examined for 1‐, 2‐, 3‐, 4‐, and 5‐factor models across count…
Do I amuse you? Asymmetric predictors for humor appreciation and humor production
Blurred world view
Previous studies suggest that distorted representations of reality on television can lead to distorted perceptions of reality among viewers. In this study, 322 individuals in Austria reported their weekly television consumption and whether they believe that there is active practice of capital punishment in Austria, which has been abolished since 1968. The more television participants watched, the more likely they mistakenly believed that there is…
Adult attachment and transportation into narrative worlds
Adult attachment affects close bonds, including bonds with fictional characters, but does it also influence the level of engagement with fictional worlds? This article aims to build on previous research on how attachment relates to narrative transportation. In Study 1, attachment anxiety, but not attachment avoidance, predicted a greater tendency to become transported into narratives, even after controlling for broader personality traits related …
Can Differences in Word Frequency Explain Why Narrative Fiction Is a Better Predictor of Verbal Ability than Nonfiction
Individuals who read more tend to have stronger verbal skills than those who read less. Interestingly, what you read may make a difference. Past studies have found that reading narrative fiction, but not expository nonfiction, predicts verbal ability. Why this difference exists is not known. Here we investigate one possibility: whether fiction texts contain more of the words typically evaluated by verbal ability measures compared to nonfiction te…
Evaluating whether stories can promote social cognition
Stories have long been theorized to influence how we perceive our social world and our peers. Empirical research on this topic has begun to grow, with many studies exploring how stories and social cognition relate, across a range of different approaches. In order to structure past work and guide future investigations, this article presents a research framework that formalizes how, when, and why engagement with stories might promote social cogniti…
The textual features of fiction that appeal to readers
In two studies we assessed whether simple surface-level textual features of fictional works predict their appeal to readers. Specifically, we focused on the potential role of emotional valence and arousal, the presence of affective themes (i.e., sex, religion, and death), and word concreteness and frequency. In Study 1, we compiled a corpus of 1,471 short stories posted to a creative writing website and along with ratings of these stories by read…
Memory and comprehension of narrative versus expository texts
We acquire a lot of information about the world through texts, which can be categorized at the broadest level into two primary genres: narratives and exposition. Stories and essays differ across a variety of dimensions, including structure and content, with numerous theories hypothesizing that stories are easier to understand and recall than essays. However, empirical work in this area has yielded mixed results. To synthesize research in this are…
Zahra or Zoe, Arjun or Andrew? Bicultural baby names reflect identity and pragmatic concerns
Baby naming among ethnic minorities is a complex cultural decision, reflecting both identity and pragmatic concerns. Implications for studies of acculturation and identity, and future research directions are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)
Adult attachment and engagement with fictional characters
Adult attachment influences how people engage with stories, in terms of how immersed or transported they become into these narratives and the tendency to form close bonds with characters. This likely stems from the ability of stories and story characters to provide interpersonal intimacy without the threat of rejection. In Study 1, we expand on this work to examine how attachment relates to two previously uninvestigated aspects of character engag…
Select your character
In this study, we investigate whether avatar choice is based on an alignment between perceptions of that avatar and one’s own psychological needs. Data are not publicly available but will be provided upon request
Multilingualism and mentalizing abilities in adults
Bilingual children have better Theory-of-Mind compared to monolingual children, but comparatively little research has examined whether this advantage in social cognitive ability also applies to adults. The current study investigated whether multilingual status and/or number of known languages predicts performance on a mentalizing task in a large sample of adult participants. Multilingualism was decomposed based on whether English is the first lan…
Weird reactions to weird Twitter
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 o…
Psychology (26 obras) · Social Psychology (17 obras) · Media Influence and Health (11 obras) · Art (9 obras) · Cognitive psychology (9 obras) · Narrative (9 obras) · Developmental psychology (8 obras) · Literature (8 obras) · Linguistics (7 obras) · Cognition (6 obras)