Literature and emotions: how emotions are depicted in short-stories.

The study examined how emotions are depicted in short stories (which emotions are described, in what way) to verify, on the basis of analytical features (e.g., antecedent types, nature of the various components of emotional experience, regulation attempts, role of other individuals on the emotional experience or on its expression) the extent to which representations are prototypical, and normative (with regard to gender stereotypes too). The analysis was carried out on a casual set of 266 emotional events taken from 71 contemporary Italian short story writers of established reputation. The obtained results showed that short story narratives represent emotions according to a very rich prototypical conceptualization that is culturally shared, giving direct support to the hypothesis that literature constitutes an important cultural source of knowledge about emotions