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ABSTRACT
Our human tendency to remember more and pay more attention to negative events (rather than positive ones) may be at the core of our ‘enjoyment’ of the arts. Indeed, if we engage in sad and tragic stories, it may well be because we have a built-in propensity to be affected by situations eliciting negative emotions (i.e. a psychological phenomenon called the ‘Negativity Bias’). A good example of this seemingly paradoxical tendency is Fernando de Rojas’s Celestina (1499). Although the premise of the story is that of an amour courtois between two young lovers, Calisto and Melibea, the story ends with a suicide and, in between, there are also one murder, one accident leading to death and two executions. And yet, it was a bestseller at the time. This attraction to stories that elicit negative affects is also hypothesized to be the result of evolutionary pressures.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 See also Simon (Citation2017).
2 Gerardo Vera’s filmic adaptation, La Celestina (1996) with Penélope Cruz, Terele Pávez and Juan Diego Botto, is a case in point, as it strove to emphasize more the lustiness and depravity of the characters.
3 See for instance Joseph Snow’s Citation2011 essay, 'Darkness, Death and Despair in Celestina.'
4 See 'Top Lifetime Grosses' on Box Office Mojo (Citationn.d.).
5 On these paradoxes on our engagement with media and stories, see for instance Hanich et al. (Citation2014), Koopman (Citation2015), Menninghaus et al. (Citation2017) and Oliver (Citation1993).
6 Several scholars in the psychological research on art reception have pointed out the centrality of this phenomenon to their model of how we process narratives (see Menninghaus et al. Citation2017; 15).
7 See Baumeister et al. (Citation2001), Rozin and Royzman (Citation2001) and Lazarus (Citation2021).
8 See for instance the ‘Distance-Embracing model’ by Menninghaus et al. (Citation2017).
9 See for example Cova, Deonna, and Sander (Citation2017); Hanich et al. (Citation2014); Koopman (Citation2015); Menninghaus et al. (Citation2017); Oliver (Citation1993).
10 For Keen, when the feeling of negative emotions may be facilitating narrative empathy and character identification (Citation2022, 6).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Julien Jacques Simon
Julien Jacques Simon is Associate Professor of Spanish at Indiana University East. His research focuses on early modern Spanish studies, Fernando de Rojas’ Celestina, Cervantes, cinema and literature and cognitive literary studies. His publications include Cognitive Cervantes (Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America, spring 2012), Cognitive Literary Studies (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012), Cognitive Approaches to Early Modern Spanish Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), Self, Other, and Context in Early Modern Spain (Juan de la Cuesta, 2017) and Cervantes and the Early Modern Mind (New York: Routledge, 2022). He is also co-founder of the working group Literary Theory, Cognition, and the Brain at Yale University’s Whitney Humanities Center as well as a former member of Purdue University’s Center for Cognitive Literary Studies Steering Committee, of Indiana University’s Experimental Humanities group and of the executive committee for the Modern Language Association Division on Cognitive Approaches to Literature (chair in 2013).