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DANIEL T. LOCHMAN, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene

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related to degree of arousal. Emotional responses appear to occur
more rapidly for negatively-inflected words than for neutral ones and
may precede conscious response; memories of fiction tied to emotion
are retained longer than those not stimulating emotional arousal. 21
Using fMRI, psychologist Christopher Baldassano and his team at
Princeton conclude that short-term memories of fiction are “chunked”
in the hippocampus as episodic memories and, when encoded strong-
ly as by an emotional response, are stored in cortical regions associated
with long-term memory, such as the angular gyrus and posterior me-
dial cortex. From those regions, memories are reinstated more quickly
than from the amygdala and hippocampus, even when recurrence oc-
curs in different modalities, as in film and audio-narration. Not sur-
prisingly, familiarity — the repetition of similar experiences or
“scripts” in fiction — also has been found to stimulate reinstatement
22
of memory. Miall suggests that the “unfolding of the present narra-
tive is shaped by its activation of a prior narrative latent in memory”
— memory that Caracciolo links to autobiographical experience both
inside and outside the text in an evolving “double movement between
storytelling and background.” Miall also cites evidence that embodied
responses to fictions may be stimulated by a salient word, se ing, or

20
See Graham C. Sco et al., “Emotion Word Processing: Evidence from
Event-Related Potential,” Biological Psychology 80 (2009): 95-104, an Evoked-
Response Potential (ERP) study that found response to negative words of
high frequency occurs as early as 135-180 msecs after a text is introduced;
Sara C. Sereno et al., “Emotion Word Processing: Does Mood Make a Differ-
ence?” Frontiers in Psychology 6 (August 2015): 1-13.
21 Miall, “Emotions and the Structuring of Narrative Responses,” 329-30. See
Graham C. Sco et al., “Emotion Word Processing: Evidence from Event-Re-
lated Potential,” Biological Psychology 80 (2009): 95-104, an Evoked-Response
Potential (ERP) study that found response to negative words of high frequen-
cy occurs as early as 135-180 msecs after being introduced; Johanna Kissler
et al., “Buzzwords: Early Cortical Responses to Emotional Words during
Reading,” Psychological Science 18 (2007): 475-80, reports that emotional con-
notative words are distinguished from neutral words in under 200 msecs, as
a pre-conscious response.
22 Baldassano et al., “Discovering Event Structure in Continuous Narrative Per-
ception and Memory,” Neuron 95 (2 August 2017): 709-21, especially 714-18.

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