David Miall

David Miall
University of Alberta | UAlberta · Department of English and Film Studies

Ph.D University of Wales

About

116
Publications
54,251
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
3,150
Citations
Education
August 1976 - July 1979
University of Wales
Field of study
  • English Literature
September 1972 - May 1976
University of Stirling
Field of study
  • English Literature

Publications

Publications (116)
Article
Full-text available
The series of articles applies the BPS model as developed in the previous papers. It addresses address social interaction in terms also used to describe biological and psychic interactions. This way, a logical continuity is established allowing to address the three components in an inherently coherent approach.
Article
Full-text available
Being social means to individually refer and relate to others, these functions being seen as constituents of what is called Society. Whereas being alive and having a psyche may in a simplifying approach be at first conceptualised as non-referential, introducing also the social component of a biopsychosocial model (BPS model) necessitates taking int...
Article
Full-text available
The basic concept applied in the previous articles differs from present concepts of time and space and hence will be dealt with in more detail in this and the paper which follows. As previously, the principal goal is to achieve an internal homogeneity of terms and concepts applicable for the three intellectually delineated realms of biological, psy...
Article
Full-text available
In this last of our current series of articles, we describe social interactions in terms of the advanced model of biopsychosocial interaction. Developing the model was meant to explain a conceptual homogeneity overarching all its discretised parts. In effect, we can integrate all relevant contextual processes in understanding human experience and b...
Article
Full-text available
To ‘embrace’ focused parts of an addressed environment is the way enclosure of outside foci may be described. Here, the opening of the transfer institution called logical lock (LL) in the previous series of articles points, toward the outside of the individual, selects finite parts of it and either rejects them or utilizes them to achieve the corre...
Article
Full-text available
To address subjectivity, as a generally rooted phenomenon, other ways of visualisation must be applied than in conventional objectivistic approaches. Using ‘trees’ as operational metaphors, as employed in Arthur Cayley’s ‘theory of the analytical forms called trees’, one rooted ‘tree’ must be set beneath the other and, if such ‘trees’ are combined,...
Article
Full-text available
As Miles and Asbridge point out in their recent editorial introduction within the Journal “to treat patients as persons is ... an imperative that should in due course come to be established as a mandatory competency” [1], especially since the person-centered approach has demonstrated its ability to generate superior clinical outcomes at potentially...
Article
Full-text available
Based on part I of the trilogy, the advanced model of biopsychosocial interaction in this second part refers to a concept of nascent space and time, itself emerging from the Aristotelian concept of potentia and actus. The corresponding graphics resemble the analytical forms called trees, as introduced by Arthur Cayley. Inside-outside differentiatio...
Chapter
Literary expressions of the sublime put unusual stresses on language-witness Percy Shelley's letter when he first sees Mont Blanc with its examples of defamiliarization: disrupted or unusual syntax, the senses being under pressure, and figures that suggest a merging of mind and nature. Other contexts in which such linguistic phenomena can be found...
Article
Full-text available
The current biopsychosocial model is predominantly descriptive, ontological, semantic and formal issues need to be integrated within it in order to update this approach. Covering aspects of both human biology and human personhood requires the level of discretised facts, the level of underlying coherences and their meaning, to be taken into account....
Article
Full-text available
There is an undeniable difference in the approaches to intellection and discovery sciences and the humanities. Any model that claims to unify these different approaches must prove to be in accordance with both objectivistic and subject-oriented thinking. In the following article we first check the applicability of our models in two areas that belon...
Article
There is an undeniable difference of approaches in science and humanities. Any model that claims to unify these different approaches must prove to be in accordance with both the objectivistic and the subject-oriented thinking. In the following article we first check our models applicability in two areas that belong to our individual research expert...
Article
Full-text available
In the present paper the approach, as outlined in our previous articles, is applied to a range of subjects. Its main goal is to understand how human specifics such as use of language, cultural creativity, rational thinking and the use of abstractive terms interfere with human beings basic organic processes. This necessitates an examination at the l...
Chapter
Scientific Approaches to Literature in Learning Environments is not just about what takes place in literary classrooms. Settings do have a strong influence on student learning both directly and indirectly. These spaces may include the home, the workplace, science centers, libraries, that is, contexts that entail diverse social, physical, psychologi...
Chapter
This chapter presents a concept of the embodied mind in literary reading. Arguing for the body as an active participant in shaping the aesthetic experience, it begins with examples of the active body taken from Donne, Woolf, and Wordsworth. Empirical study of readers’ systematic responses to foregrounding (striking stylistic elements) is then shown...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
To initiate a debate about an advanced bio-psycho-social (bps) model we suggest a formal approach to better achieve communication of its up to now diverging and mutually isolated constituents. As the main problem with the current bps model researchers identified its lack of internal formal homogeneity. Its aims are respectable and widely accepted....
Chapter
The recent turn to an embodied conception of cognition brings with it several significant implications for understanding literature and the processes of reading. I will begin with three important points made by Ralph Ellis (2005) in Curious Emotions, who puts these forward as foundational. First, he emphasises the primacy of emotions: ‘fully intent...
Chapter
Full-text available
One of the prominent features of literary reading is a sense of defamiliarization: a passage describing an object, event, or person in the mundane world unexpectedly seems strange, so that the reader is made to pause or slow the pace of reading in order to reflect. In Owen Barfield’s words, such moments seem to come from “a different plane or mode...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Background: In a combined effort of different disciplines, in the past 15 years we tried to overcome the terminological gap between mental and immunological parts of e.g. allergic asthma reactions. This gap is not seen on a purely descriptive, including a purely statistical level. If we e.g. use the descriptive term "stress" and investigate the sta...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Background: Words are effective as part of transformation units. A transformation unit is a fully arranged (but changeable) temporospatial lattice of transformation chains and time-planes. It becomes the characteristics of a unit, if itʼs time-planes are at least tentatively defined up to the end. Representing qualifying properties related to each...
Article
I begin by reviewing some conflicting views on what empathy is, how it can occur, and if it is even possible: the scholars mainly discussed are Currie, Carroll, Walton, and Oatley. I conclude that something called empathy does indeed occur - readers tell us that is does - but that it involves psychological processes that involve some properties of...
Article
In his early poetic writing (around 1797-99), William Wordsworth (1770-1850) often expressed a sense of animism: a sentience to be found not only in living beings but also in the air and in stones. Support for the underlying, psychological meaning of Wordsworth's account is provided by recent developments in the study of embodied cognition, now tak...
Article
In light of the hard times in which literary education has been finding itself, this paper evaluates the merits of two instructional interventions. It describes an experiment which contrasts interpretive and experiential approaches to reading carried out with 17 Comparative Literature Canadian university students. Two different sets of pre-reading...
Chapter
In reading literary texts we use our feelings and our pre-knowledge of the world around us to comprehend what we read. Our body can play an important role in the reading experience, since feelings and pre-knowledge are tied to it. At the same time, through absorption in a literary text our awareness of our body can become diminished. Two experiment...
Article
Full-text available
To articulate what constitutes expressive reading, we conducted a phenomenological study of readers' responses to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. After reading the poem twice during 1 week, each of 40 readers chose five passages that they found striking or evocative and then commented on each one. Numerically aided...
Article
Research that suggests the primacy of the emotions provides the context for a study of some of the processes sustained by the emotions during literary reading. In particular, the early processing of emotion in response to language, including narrative, is shown by several ERP (evoked-response potentials) studies that focus on the first 500 msecs of...
Article
What is meant by a scientific approach to literature? I suggest that this question raises several issues: the need to elucidate the object of study, that is, to examine readings that reflect the literariness of the text; also the question how literariness is to be identified, what may be distinctive about it. Then I suggest the importance of defini...
Article
Full-text available
A study of advanced level English students who read Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner indicated that, after a lapse of 2 or more years, impactful loss (e.g., loss due to death) facilitated a mode of reading called expressive enactment. In this mode of reading: (a) stylistic features give narrative objects, characters, and places a sensuou...
Conference Paper
Despite the efforts from stylisticians to produce evidence-based theories for the teaching of literature (e.g., Watson & Zyngier, 2006; Hanauer, 2010), not much can be claimed to have been achieved in terms of sensitizing students to the literary experience. Regardless of the pedagogical strategies employed so far – be it close reading, applied lit...
Conference Paper
If voices that predict the end of literature as a discipline are to be challenged, evidence-based theories for the teaching of literature are highly needed. In this study, we consider whether the language of instructions affects the experience of reading by examining interventions which enable a comparison between cognitive and affective reading pr...
Conference Paper
This study aims to assess students’ experiences of literary education. We believe that a mismatch between students and teachers’ expectations may cause alienation and discouragement on the part of the students as they strive to engage seriously in literary reading. Two questionnaires were applied to 106 first year students in a Canadian university:...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Poster; Abstract in: Allergy (2010) 65, Suppl. 92, 560 Asthma, Stress & Informatics A unified model Thomas Fröhlich (1), Bevier FF (2), Henningsen Peter (1, 3), Miall, David S (1, 4), Sandberg, Seija (5) (1) Heidelberg Metasystems GmbH, Heidelberg, Germany (2) bussole InformationsVerlag, Winden, Germany (3) Munich Technical University, Klinikum...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Problem: Momentary states of bodily transformations usually are mapped as measured values of a given property, e.g. of arterial blood pressure or of pulmonary tissue dysfunction, with blood pressure being mapped via a high or low value, and pulmonary tissue dysfunction status as high or low FEV1. The same holds true for a property like stress level...
Article
Full-text available
Empirical study of literature has primarily emerged from two sources: literary theory (especially theories of stylistics and narrative) and psychology (personality, discourse processing, emotion). In this paper I apply its insights to a study of the place of feeling in literary reading, focusing in particular on the experiences of the ordinary or »...
Article
Full-text available
Directions in Empirical Literary Studies is on the cutting edge of empirical studies and is a much needed volume. It both widens the scope of empirical studies and looks at them from an intercultural perspective by bringing together renowned scholars from the fields of philosophy, sociology, psychology, linguistics and literature, all focusing on h...
Chapter
Evaluation is central to literary studies and has led to an impressive list of publications on the status and history of the canon. Yet it is remarkable how little attention has been given to the role of textual properties in evaluative processes. Most of the chapters in The Quality of Literature redress this issue by dealing with texts or genres r...
Article
Full-text available
Commentators have spoken of the moment of sublime experience as one of amazement, of being overwhelmed by the strikingness of the sublime appearance. The sublime, in other words, is an effect of defamiliarization. If a poet is to embody the sublime experience in language (i.e., in the poetic sublime), we would expect the resources of linguistic for...
Article
Full-text available
Book History 9 (2006) 291-311 What is literary reading, and is it possible to distinguish it from other kinds of reading? I have two reasons for beginning with this question. First, it evokes some central controversies over reading that have occurred in the last two or three decades that remain unresolved; and, second, such controversies suggest th...
Article
The study explores how readers from an ethnic minority or from an ethnic majority negotiate their cultural identities within a multicultural context. It examines to what extent readers who were either Chinese-Canadian or Euro-Canadian become personally implicated in their reading experiences. Readers were asked to comment on passages that they foun...
Article
Full-text available
Self-modifying feelings during literary reading were studied in relation to the personality trait, absorption. Participants read a short story, described their experience of 3 striking or evocative passages in the story, and completed the Tellegen Absorption Scale (Tellegen, 1982). Compared to readers with either low or moderate absorption scores,...
Article
Full-text available
Literary reading has the capacity to implicate the self and deepen self- understanding, but little is known about how and when these effects occur. The present article examines two forms of self-implication in literary reading. In one form, which functions like simile, there is explicitly recognized similarity between personal memories and some asp...
Article
Full-text available
This article is concerned with the moment-by-moment unfolding of the text as we might suppose the reader to experience it; in addressing one aspect of this reading experience, I propose a definition of the episode, and of episode structure, in lit- erary narratives. To do so, I draw on insights from Ingarden, Iser, Barthes, Eco, Jim Rosenberg, and...
Article
Full-text available
Caretaker-infant attachment is a complex but well-recognized adaptation in humans. An early instance of (or precursor to) attachment behavior is the dyadic interaction between adults and infants of 6 to 24 weeks, com-monly called "babytalk." Detailed analysis of 1 minute of spontaneous babytalk with an 8-week infant shows that the poetic texture of...
Article
Feelings during literary reading can be characterized at four levels. First, feelings such as enjoyment, pleasure, or the satisfaction of reading are reactions to an already interpreted text [Spiel 9 (1990) 277]. While providing an incentive to sustain reading, these feelings play no significant role in the distinctively literary aspects of text in...
Article
The sound of the language in a literary text is often thought to contribute to its meaning. We hypothesize that this is due not to fixed or universal phoneme properties, as theories of phonetic symbolism have supposed, but to the use of local phonetic contrasts to elicit meaning. Writers may set an overall range of phonetic tones that are distincti...
Article
Full-text available
Comparative Literature Studies 39.3 (2002) 259-262 Until recently, discussion of electronic media among literary scholars has been framed in terms of poststructuralist theory (as in the writings of George Landow, Jay David Bolter, Stuart Moulthrop). Hypertext, the medium that has received the most attention, has been considered to exemplify the unm...
Article
Full-text available
Along with many other aspects of north american culture, literary studies is being swept into the digital age. In considering what this might mean, I examine in particular how the Internet, with its many and protean conveniences for literature, is beginning to supplant the library, that traditional bastion of the text. The prospects for literature...
Article
Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing (EMDR) is a controversial treatment for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder that requires clients to make rapid eye movements while revisualizing a traumatic event. Although seemingly effective, the process by which EMDR exerts its effects is poorly understood. We propose that EMDR's eye movements facilitate the...
Article
A strong intuition that phonemic qualities suggest meaning has motivated discussions of the sound of language since the time of Plato. However, studies of phonetic symbolism this century have been inconclusive: while systematic contrasts of meaning have often been found, these are not necessarily due to innate phonetic meanings. An alternative appr...
Article
Full-text available
Complementarity between quantitative and qualitative methods often implies that qualitative methods are a step toward quantitative precision or that quantitative and qualitative methods provide mutually validating "triangulation." However, there also is unacknowledged quantification within the type of analytic induction that is considered pivotal i...
Chapter
Full-text available
Empirical studies of readers' responses to narrative have typically been concerned with the influence of story factors such as those modeled in story grammars or discourse analysis. Such models have shown the influence of propositional complexity, narrative structure, and various aspects of plot. However, in a recent paper (Miall and Kuiken, 1994a)...
Chapter
The Psychology and Sociology of Literature is a collection of 25 chapters on literature by some of the leading psychologists, sociologists, and literary scholars in the field of the empirical study of literature. Contributors include Ziva Ben-Porat, Gerry Cupchik, Art Graesser, Rachel Giora, Norbert Groeben, Colin Martindale, David Miall, Willie va...
Article
Hypertext has been promoted as a vehicle that will change literary reading, especially through its recovery of images, supposed to be suppressed by print, and through the choice offered to the reader by links. Evidence from empirical studies of reading, however, suggests that these aspects of hypertext may disrupt reading. In a study of readers who...
Article
Setting appears to play a major role in regional fictional narratives, establishing connections between setting and the actions of characters, or between their mood and behaviour. The impact of specific regional settings in two short stories was examined empirically. A Canadian and a Brazilian text were coded for foregrounded features and for the p...
Article
Full-text available
this paper, we will present an empirical study with readers of a literary hypertext in which subjects provided us with evidence of their reading processes, enabling us to analyse readers' pathways through a hypertext in relation to reading times per node and self-recorded commentary
Article
Full-text available
It is now widely maintained that the concept of "literariness" has been critically examined and found deficient. Prominent literary theorists have argued that there are no special characteristics that distinguish literature from other texts. Similarly, cognitive science has often subsumed literary understanding within a general theory of discourse...
Article
The fictional world imaginatively constituted during literary reading is sometimes compared with the imaginal world created during dreaming. At the core of both reading and dreaming may be the type of attentional adjustment that occurs when departures from expected events emerge in experience. During dreaming, markers of this attentional adjustment...
Article
Full-text available
It is now widely maintained that the concept of literariness has been critically examined and found deficient. Prominent postmodern literary theorists have argued that there are no special characteristics that distinguish literature from other texts. Similarly, cognitive psychology has often subsumed literary understanding within a general theory o...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Higher order processes in literary or aesthetic response include transformations of existing sensory and ideational materials as well as integrative mechanisms: these may be modeled on Damasio's (1989) suggested convergence zones. Co-occurring or time-locked neuronal firing can be schematized within a matrix of differently weighted probability vect...
Article
The assumption that formal features in literary texts typically shape response, which has been a theme of literary theory almost since its beginnings, has been rejected by poststructuralist critics. If formal features are considered, they argue, this is because social or institutional conventions direct readers' attention to them. We argue that thi...
Article
Full-text available
Setting appears to play a major role in regional fictional narratives, establishing connections between setting and the actions of characters, or between their mood and behaviour. The impact of specific regional settings in two short stories was examined empirically. A Canadian and a Brazilian text were coded for foregrounded features and for the p...
Article
An inadequate grasp of the role of imagination has vitiated understanding of human cognition in western thinking. Extending a project initiated with George Lakoff in Metaphors we Live By (1980), Mark Johnson's book The Body in the Mind (1987) offers the claim that all thinking originates in bodily experience. A range of schemata formed during our e...
Article
Full-text available
Explores the dream inquiries of 19th century poet S.T. Coleridge, especially as revealed in his poem "The Pains of Sleep." Coleridge wrote "Pains" in the midst of a long walk alone across Scotland in 1803, during which he was probably suffering the withdrawal symptoms of opium addiction. Also explored are Coleridge's metaphysics, his relationship t...
Article
Anticipation and feeling are taken to be significant components of the process of literary reading, although cognitive theories of reading have tended to neglect them. Recent neuropsychological research is described that casts light on these processes: the paper focuses on the integrative functions of the prefrontal cortex responsible for anticipat...
Article
A newly developed instrument, the Literary Response Questionnaire (LRQ), provides scales that measure seven different aspects of readers’ orientation toward literary texts: Insight, Empathy, Imagery Vividness, Leisure Escape, Concern with Author, Story-Driven Reading, and Rejection of Literary Values. The present report presents evidence that each...
Article
The notion that stylistic features of literary texts deautomatize perception is central to a tradition of literary theory from Coleridge through Shklovsky and Mukařovský to Van Peer. Stylistic variations, known as foregrounding, hypothetically prompt defamiliarization, evoke feelings, and prolong reading time. These possibilities were tested in fou...
Article
Full-text available
Approaches to text comprehension that focus on propositional, inferential, and elaborative processes have often been considered capable of extension in principle to literary texts, such as stories or poems. However, we argue that literary response is influenced by stylistic features that result in defamiliarization; that defamiliarization invokes f...
Article
Full-text available
Existing methods for text analysis, based on the z-score, are used to identify significant collocates of emotion words in the notebooks of Coleridge. The collocates found are shown to be both distinctive to Coleridge's lexicon for emotion and to differ from the lexicon of a sample of representative contemporary writings on emotion. A new method is...
Article
The assumption that formal features in literary texts typically shape response, which has been a theme of literary theory almost since its beginnings, has been rejected by poststructuralist critics. If formal features are considered, they argue, this is because social or institutional conventions direct readers' attention to them. We argue that thi...
Article
It is argued that empirical studies of readers' responses to literary texts are required, which would test current theoretical models of response. The present paper proposes that literary texts possess an intrinsic structure, which can be demonstrated in readers' responses. A study is reported in which response data from readers was obtained while...
Article
Full-text available
A text retrieval program for IBM-compatible microcomputers, Personal Librarian (formerly known as SIRE), is reviewed for its relevance to undergraduate study of literary texts in the classroom. In addition to supporting the standard text retrieval functions, with searches for words and collocates, support of Boolean operators, and a proximity opera...
Article
Previous accounts of the role of emotion in construct theory place insufficient emphasis on the constructive role of emotion as a “feeling toward.” Emotion is regarded either as an epiphenomenon of acts of construal or as an outcome of prior cognitive processes. It is argued in this paper that emotion performs an anticipatory role in pursuit of the...
Article
The narratives studied by schema-based models or story grammars are generally simpler than those found in literary texts, such as short stories or novels. Literary narratives are indeterminate, exhibiting conflicts between schemata and frequent ambiguities in the status of narrative elements. An account of the process of comprehending such complex...
Article
Dissatisfactions with current teaching of English are caused by a misalignment between recent theoretical understanding of the subject and teaching methods which remain largely concerned with interpretations of texts. A model of student-centred learning is described, which offers specific answers to four problems: student motivation, the acquisitio...
Chapter
One standard approach to narrative which is, I take it, derived from Romantic theory, runs through the Russian Formalists, and into current views such as those of Perry and Iser.1 For shorthand I shall call it the defamiliarisation model. It assumes that there is a set of norms and conventions which the text calls into play, only to unsettle them i...
Article
Literary narratives are primarily about people, their experiences, behaviour and goals, and about relationships between people. Recent studies in social cognition have suggested that affect is the primary medium in which social episodes and information about the self are represented. It is argued that theories of text processing that adopt an infor...
Article
Staff time in higher education is an expensive resource. As staff-student ratios become less favourable the problem of staffing seminar or tutorial work with students intensifies. Is it inevitable that group sizes must be increased? A seminar with more than ten or twelve students, however, probably ceases to function in an effective sense for many...
Article
In an incidental learning task, the effectiveness of self-reference as a learning strategy is equalled by that of reference to a friend in terms of amount of material remembered, and both are more effective than reference to imagery or the commonness of material. The results of the present study, however, show that reference to the self enhances me...

Network

Cited By