What is it about?
Examined the aesthetic qualities of trance-inductive (TI) poetry. 41 (university student) readers, classified as low- and high-absorption, read a TI poem characterized by high metric regularity and rated the poem on 7 7-point evaluative scales. While low-absorption Ss found the poem to be boring and unpleasant, high-absorption Ss found the poem to be interesting and pleasant. Low-absorption Ss responded to a flat sequence of monotonously rhyming lines, finding the text to be boring, while the high-absorption Ss detected hierarchic structure in the poetic text, finding the latter to be pleasing.
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Why is it important?
See also this more recent chapter: Glicksohn, J., & Berkovich-Ohana, A. (2012). Absorption, immersion, and consciousness. In J. Gackenbach (Ed.), Video game play and consciousness (pp. 83-99). New York: Nova Science Publishers, Inc.
Perspectives
Trance-inductive poetry, having a characteristic rhythmic structure, should be appreciated differently by readers differing in trait Absorption. That what some readers view as being boring is viewed by others as being interesting is the very essence of individual differences in aesthetic appreciation.
Professor Joseph Glicksohn
Bar-Ilan University
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This page is a summary of: Absorption and Trance-Inductive Poetry, Empirical Studies of the Arts, July 1991, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.2190/e4a8-89a9-dq54-5ryc.
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