An Integrative S-S-B Model To The Study On Empathy In The Light Of Cognitive Poetics

Empathy is generally regarded as the ability to put oneself into another's shoes. It has long been explored by scholars of various fields based on experiments and self-report experience. At present, the mainstream researches of empathy lie in cognitive psychology and neuroscience, in which one of the thriving debates is whether empathy is cognitive or affective. Emotion is an obvious point where literature and cognition meet (Stockwell, 2002, p. 171), and empathy is the way to understand another's thought and emotion, so Stockwell (2007, p. 146) claims,"Principled work in emotion and empathy remains a key area for current cognitive poetics". He (2002, p. 2) proposes that through cognitive poetics we can generalize cognitive patterns and principles, so we seek to understand the cognitive and affective patterns of empathy through poetic reading in the light of cognitive poetics, combined with the theories from cognitive psychology and linguistics.This thesis presents a theoretical account of empathy and explores the minds of people who are seeking to understand other people's minds. First, we give a brief account of the history studies on empathy in aesthetics, literature, psychology and slinguistics, classifying definitions of empathy into four types, and then attempt to construct an integrative model of empathy by analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of Conceptual Blending Theory (CBT), the Selective Model of Empathy (SME) and Principle of Similarity (PS) in interpreting empathy. As basic cognitive mechanisms, CBT and PS respectively have their explanatory power in empathy, to some extend, in literary reading while SME can explain empathy with humans but cannot explain empathy aroused by animals, objects and language. In a word, CBT, SME and PS have their own limitations. The integrative S-S-B model is proposed to give a better interpretation upon empathy.As poetry is typical literary style, we apply the S-S-B model to interpret empathy during poetic reading to test its feasibility and explanatory power. According to the poetic features that stimulate empathy, we classify empathy into rhythm, sound, imagery and form empathy, because poetry achieves its emotional and aesthetic effects with concentrated words by relying on imagery, rhythmic pattern and structure, etc. The cognitive and affective empathy is a dynamic process generated by activation, imagination, association, and selection on the grounds that readers share experiences with the poets or characters, or readers recognize the psychological similarities between emotions and objects. When the salient information, closely related to emotions, and the information, congenial to the readers'and others'emotional states and emotional context, are processed and blended, one can feel the emotions and infer the thoughts extended by poets. The S-S-B model and the application of it to empathetic reading demonstrate that the process of empathy is cognitive as well as affective.