We know surprisingly little about how the brain deals with longer segments of verbal information like stories or conversations. Does the situational context affect how information is processed? Does it matter who communicates information for what we perceive as relevant? My goal is to understand a) social factors that affect communication and persuasion success in different contexts, and b) how different ‘engagement mode settings’ influence how the language system in the brain interacts with other cognitive systems, e.g. episodic memory or social cognition.
I use a wide range of research methods including functional (connectivity) MRI, (large scale) behavioral experiments with healthy young and older people as well as patients with brain damage, semantic network modeling, and meta-analyses of behavioral and functional neuroimaging data. More recently, I also started research on public health and education, and fiction reading for which I use mixed method longitudinal interventions.
I am a supporter of open science and try to preregister all my studies, publish as much data and code as possible, and upload preprints of my manuscripts. You can find information about individual projects on on my Open Science profile.
The Narrator Project
Story telling and engaging with stories is probably the most unique human behaviour that exists. How do people get involved in stories? How do they picture characters and events? What makes people get lost in stories and experience intense emotions and create personal memories of fictional worlds? In the Narrator Project we are looking at how people differ in how they engage in stories -either fiction or other people’s stories- and how this affects the relationships and interactions between people. This is an interdisciplinary collaboration between Buddhika Bellana (https://www.buddhikabellana.com) and me to explore behaviour and brain dynamics of aesthetic experiences, social dynamics, event cognition, memory, and language. This project is supported by a Welcome Trust ISSF Award for ‘The Narrator Project’ (2022) and a HaSS Pioneer Award (2021).
Stigma and Social Bias
We know that the appearance of people does not only affect how we perceive them, but also how we relate to and communicate with them. Beautiful people are often treated with preference while people whose appearance deviates from the norm are often associated with unfavorable stereotypes and treated worse than their more attractive peers. While it has been established that stereotypes for people who belong to one or more stigmatized groups exist, it is not clear how these affect cognition and communication when people engage with each other. I am investigating how stigma affects social interaction and potential applications for overcoming social bias. Currently, I am working on several projects related to facial differences, racial, and weight related biases in professional settings, health care provision, and legal contexts. Together with my students, I designed a phone app to test the effectiveness of educational interventions to reduce racial bias (preprint and code coming soon).
Reading for Wellbeing and Learning
Most people agree that reading is ‘good for you’ and we encourage children to enjoy reading from early on. Though this evidence is disputed, a few studies found a link between reading and better social skills. But how this connection works and whether there is in fact a causal connection is far from clear. Last year, together with a group of students and Angela Kennedy (https://www.innovatingforwellbeing.co.uk), we conducted a large intervention bibliotherapy study to look at the effects of fiction reading and wellbeing (preprint coming soon). There are several new projects in the planning that involve vulnerable populations in collaboration with libraries (e.g., https://helparsal.com/library).
Franziska Hartung, PhD 