psychology case study on fictional character

An official website of the United States government

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

• Publications
• Account settings

Preview improvements coming to the PMC website in October 2024. Learn More or Try it out now .

• Advanced Search
• Journal List
• Elsevier Sponsored Documents

‘I’ve learned I need to treat my characters like people’: Varieties of agency and interaction in Writers’ experiences of their Characters’ Voices

John foxwell.

a Department of English Studies, Durham University, Hallgarth House, 77 Hallgarth Street, Durham DH1 3AY, United Kingdom

Ben Alderson-Day

b Department of Psychology, Durham University, Science Laboratories, South Road, Durham DH1 3LE, United Kingdom

Charles Fernyhough

Angela woods.

• • Varied phenomenology of writers’ experiences of characters’ voices.
• • Important point of comparison for experiences of non-actual agents.
• • Automatized use of personality models suggesting non-inferential theory of mind.

Writers often report vivid experiences of hearing characters talking to them, talking back to them, and exhibiting independence and autonomy. However, systematic empirical studies of this phenomenon are almost non-existent, and as a result little is known about its cause, extent, or phenomenology. Here we present the results of a survey of professional writers ( n  = 181) run in collaboration with the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Participants provided detailed descriptions of their experiences of their characters in response to a phenomenological questionnaire, and also reported on imaginary companions, inner speech and hallucination-proneness. Qualitative analysis indicated that the phenomenology of the experience of agentive characters varied in terms of the characters’ separateness from the writer’s self and the kinds of interaction this did or did not allow for. We argue that these variations can be understood in relation to accounts of mindreading and agency tracking which adopt intuitive as opposed to inferential models.

1. Introduction

Engaging with fictional characters is a complex cognitive act which involves the interaction of a range of psychological processes, from mental imagery, to empathy, to theory of mind ( Waugh, 2015 , Oatley, 2012 , Keen, 2006 , Zunshine, 2006 ). Particularly intriguing – and difficult to account for – is the experience which frequently emerges from the creation of fictional characters. A large number of writers report vivid experiences of ‘hearing’ their characters talking to them, talking back to them, and exhibiting an atypical degree of independence and autonomy ( Watkins, 1986 , Taylor et al., 2003 , Porter Abbott, 2011 ):

Just as summer was ending, one or more of my characters – Celie, Shug, Albert, Sofia, or Harpo – would come for a visit. We would sit wherever I was, and talk. They were very obliging, engaging, and jolly. They were, of course, at the end of their story but were telling it to me from the beginning. Things that made me sad, often made them laugh. Oh, we got through that; don’t pull such a long face, they’d say (Alice Walker, 1983, p. 359 )

I always wondered about authors who told me that their characters took on a life of their own. I used to think they sounded a bit pretentious, but then I found out it’s true. I’ll find that a minor character suddenly begins to appear where she wasn’t plotted to be, clamouring for more attention and a meatier part in the narrative. (Rosie Blake, 2019 )

It does seem – and I realise this is a psychological trick and it sounds very coy – but it is as if they are speaking and leading those lives. It’s a very symbiotic relationship. You do seem to be with people who have minds of their own, thoughts of their own, but at the same time you’re very much involved in leading their lives with them. (Michael Frayn, 2011 )

Understanding what exactly such experiences entail, and why they occur, is therefore of importance to the understanding of how human beings can think about and relate to entities that lie outside of immediate and shared perceptual experience.

As an imaginative activity, the experience of fictional characters has often been understood in relation to the activities of play and make-believe, from the perspective of both readers ( Walton, 1990 ) and writers ( Watkins, 1986 ). Within this framework, characters find their analogue in childhood imaginary companions, which can similarly be experienced by their creators as wilful and independently minded. In their study of 50 writers, Taylor et al. (2003) found that 92% experienced what they termed the Illusion of Independent Agency (IIA), and that their sample scored significantly higher than general population norms on Bernstein and Putnam’s (1986) Dissociative Experiences Scale. Taylor et al. therefore suggest that both imaginary companions and the IIA are the result of children and writers (respectively) practicing imaginative pretence with such frequency that it becomes ‘automatized’, thus leading to a loss of awareness of conscious agency for these activities.

As a result of these findings, Taylor and Mannering (2007) further suggest that writers and children with imaginary companions could be considered ‘expert pretenders’, especially given what they refer to as the frequency with which writers report ‘the experience of characters becoming almost real’ ( Taylor & Mannering, 2007, pp. 240, 239 ). However, in their study Taylor et al. did not appear to separate the experience of characters’ agency and the experience of them as quasi-perceptual, whereas more recent theories of agency-tracking of non-actual agents suggest that there are good reasons for making just such a conceptual separation ( Wilkinson & Bell, 2016 ). Moreover, having had an imaginary companion during childhood did not associate with or predict a high degree of IIA ( Taylor et al., 2003 ), and figures from a more recent study ( Fernyhough, Watson, Bernini, Moseley, & Alderson-Day, 2019 ) suggest that Taylor et al.’s sample of writers did not report a higher rate of imaginary companions during childhood than is typical in an adult population sample. Therefore, although there appear to be some theoretical advantages to drawing parallels between children’s imaginary companions and the fictional characters of adult writers, evidence for a causal or trait link between the two is yet to be established.

Alternatively, writers’ experiences of their characters – particularly of their characters’ voices – could be understood according to certain models of inner speech. As verbal thought or ‘the subjective experience of language in the absence of overt and audible articulation’ ( Alderson-Day & Fernyhough, 2015, p. 931 ), inner speech would appear to encompass imaginative experiences of others’ speech, at least according to those models which view it as being essentially ‘dialogic’ and containing ‘other people’ ( Vygotsky, 1987 , Fernyhough, 1996 ). Here an analogue can be found in readers’ experiences of fictional characters, which also often involve vivid imaginative experiences of ‘hearing’ characters’ voices ( Vilhauer, 2016 , Alderson-Day et al., 2017 ). Alongside these experiences of auditory imagery, many readers infer the mental states of characters and impute intentionality ( Dixon and Bortolussi, 1996 , Herman, 2008 ). Although the processes underlying auditory imagery and social cognition are separable, readers’ experiences of fictional characters appear to provide another instance of overlap between the two. In light of the possible developmental relationship between inner speech and theory of mind ( Fernyhough & Meins, 2009 ), it is perhaps not surprising that the voice of the character (auditory imagistic) and the sense of the character as an independent agent (social-cognitive) should overlap in this fashion. However, from writers’ anecdotal accounts of their characters’ voices, it is difficult to tell whether they consider these voices to be a part of, or noticeably distinct from, their own ordinary inner speech.

Given that writers’ descriptions of their characters’ voices often appear to refer to experiences that are not typically shared by the majority of the population, it is also perhaps unsurprising that both cultural stereotypes and creativity research have associated writing with psychopathology ( Bentall, 2003 ; Sass, 2001 , Barrantes-Vidal, 2004 ). In line with this approach, the voice of the fictional character has its analogue in auditory verbal hallucination (AVH), which several prominent theories have associated with misattributed inner speech ( Frith, 1992 , Feinberg, 1978 , Bentall, 1990 ). However, although the descriptions which writers have given of their experiences of their characters might sometimes appear similar to descriptions of hallucinations, the phenomenology of these forms of experience deserves further investigation to avoid a simplistic or facile identification between them. Furthermore, while it has been suggested that hallucinatory experiences form a continuum with ‘ordinary’ psychological functioning ( Slade & Bentall, 1988 ), the extent to which hallucination-proneness correlates with aspects of imaginative experience (e.g. vividness of mental imagery) has not been established conclusively ( Bentall, 1990 , Barrett, 1993 , Aleman et al., 1999 ).

Writers’ experiences of their characters provides an important point of comparison and contrast with other forms of experience around which psychological models are constructed. However, the plausibility of any of these explanatory models – and the subsequent implications for theories of cognition – is ultimately dependent on what is meant when writers report their characters ‘talking back’, and what such experiences entail. Although there is a substantial amount of anecdotal evidence for this phenomenon, accounts can vary significantly, and it is sometimes difficult to determine the extent to which the writer in question is providing an intentionally literal or figurative description of the experience. The phenomenon has not been extensively investigated empirically, with only one large-scale study ( Taylor et al., 2003 ) and one small-scale study ( Doyle, 1998 ) that we know of.

The present study therefore set out to explore writers’ experiences of their characters’ voices in a detailed and systematic fashion using qualitative and quantitative approaches. To investigate this phenomenon, we collaborated with the Edinburgh International Book Festival to survey the large number of writers who were in attendance. Unlike all previous large-scale studies on writers to date, our sample was limited exclusively to those who were published and who had achieved sufficient professional success to warrant an invitation to one of the world’s largest and most prestigious literary festivals. The majority of our respondents specialised in fiction (77%), and particularly textual fiction (66%), though other forms and genres (e.g. poetry, non-fiction) were represented in the festival and in our sample.

The first aim of the study was to gather qualitative information on writers’ experiences of their characters’ voices, in order to shed light on what exactly writers meant when they reported ‘hearing’ their characters and having characters who ‘talked back’ to them. To this end, the survey contained a detailed phenomenological questionnaire on multiple aspects of the writing experience, including questions on dynamics, inner speech, dialogue, and agency.

The second aim of the study was to determine whether there were any differences between those writers who did and those who did not report ‘hearing’ their characters’ voices. To this end, the study also included a questionnaire on imaginary companions, a measure of everyday inner speech experiences (the Varieties of Inner Speech Questionnaire; McCarthy-Jones & Fernyhough, 2011 ), and a short measure of auditory hallucination-proneness (the Launay-Slade Hallucination Scale – Revised; Bentall & Slade, 1985 ). Based on the proposed associations between these concepts and hearing characters’ voices, we anticipated that writers who reported hearing their characters’ voices would display elevated rates of vivid inner speech and hallucination-proneness, and be more likely to have had an imaginary companion during childhood.

2. Methods and materials

2.1. participants.

Writers attending the 2014 Festival and the 2018 Festival were invited to take part in the survey via an email from the festival organisers, which expressed the aim of developing ‘a better understanding of the processes of literary creativity and in particular the ways writers and storytellers hear and interact with the voices of their characters’. The survey was not open to the general public. Of the 1486 guests invited to the festival across both years (including illustrators, artists, celebrities and public figures promoting books), a total of 181 writers (12%) took part in the survey (61% F; 37% M; 2% Other), with respondents coming primarily from the UK (82%). Participants were asked to choose a description of the form they specialised in (e.g. Fiction (Young Adult/Children’s)) from a list of seven options (see Table 1 for demographic details). The survey was live for five weeks in 2014 and six weeks in 2018. All procedures were approved by the ethics committee of a local university.

Demographics for the combined 2014 and 2018 samples.

We did not exclude poets and non-fiction writers as several responded to the survey in relation to fiction they had also written, or responded in a way that clearly demonstrated the relevance of the questions to poetry (e.g. writing in the voice of a fictional character) and non-fiction writing (e.g. historical biography). 1

2.2. Measures

The survey was divided into three parts. Section 1 – the Writers’ Inner Voices Questionnaire – specifically asked about participants’ experiences of their characters during writing. Section 2 asked about imaginary companions. Section 3 included the questionnaire items on inner speech and auditory hallucination proneness.

2.2.1. Writers’ inner voices questionnaire

A phenomenological questionnaire was devised for the study, informed by Taylor et al.’s (2003) survey of writers and Woods, Jones, Alderson-Day, Callard, and Fernyhough’s (2015) survey of voice-hearers. All questions apart from 2, 3, and 4 required free-text responses (no word limit); questions 2, 3, and 4 were followed by free-text-response sub-questions if they were answered positively.

• 1. How do you experience your characters?
• 2. Do you ever hear your characters’ voices?
• 2.i. [If yes] Please try to describe what it is like to hear your characters’ voices.
• 2.ii. [If yes] How, if at all, are these experiences different from your own thoughts or inner speech?
• 2.iii. [If yes] How, if it all, are these experiences different from hearing the voice of someone who is present in the room?
• 3. Do you have visual or other sensory experiences of your characters, or sense their presence?
• 3.i. [If yes] Please tell us about these experiences.
• 4. Can you enter into a dialogue with your characters?
• 4.i. [If yes] Please tell us about these dialogues.
• 5. Do you feel that your characters always do what you tell them to do, or do they act of their own accord?
• 6. How does the way you experience your characters’ voices feed into your writing practice? Please tell us about this process.
• 7. Once a piece of writing or performance is finished, what happens to your characters’ voices?
• 8. If there are any aspects of your experience of your characters’ voices or your characters more broadly that you would like to elaborate on, please do so here.
• 9. In contexts other than writing, do you ever have the experience of hearing voices when there is no one around? If so, please describe these experiences. How do these experiences differ from the experience of hearing the voice of a character?

2.2.2. Imaginary companions questionnaire

The questionnaire on imaginary companions consisted of three categorical questions. If respondents answered positively, the question was followed by a text-box and an invitation to describe the experience further. The three questions were:

• 1. Did you have an imaginary friend or friends when you were growing up?
• 2. Do you have an imaginary friend or friends now?
• 3. If you ever had an imaginary friend or friends, did they sometimes act of their own accord (as opposed to always doing what you told them to do)?

2.2.3. Varieties of inner speech questionnaire ( McCarthy-Jones & Fernyhough, 2011 )

The VISQ is an 18-item questionnaire relating to the phenomenological characteristics of inner speech ( McCarthy-Jones & Fernyhough, 2011 ). It includes four factors: condensed inner speech ; dialogic inner speech ; other people in inner speech ; and evaluative/motivational inner speech . Participants rated their agreement with the statements provided (e.g. ‘I hear other people’s voices nagging me in my head’) on a 7-point Likert scale. 2 Each subscale has good internal reliability (all Cronbach’s alpha > 0.70; Alderson-Day et al., 2014 , McCarthy-Jones and Fernyhough, 2011 ).

2.2.4. Launay-Slade hallucination scale – Revised ( Bentall & Slade, 1985 )

A short 5-item version of the LSHS was used to assess proneness to unusual auditory experiences ( Bentall and Slade, 1985 , Morrison et al., 2000 ). Participants rated their agreement with the following five statements relating to atypical auditory phenomena:

• 1. I hear a voice speaking my thoughts aloud.
• 2. I hear the telephone ring and find that I am mistaken.
• 3. I hear people call my name and find that nobody has done so.
• 4. I can hear music when it is not being played.
• 5. I have had the experience of hearing a person’s voice and then found that there was no one there.

Although it is a short measure, the 5-item LSHS has been shown to have a moderate/good internal reliability (Cronbach’s alpha = 0.69; McCarthy-Jones & Fernyhough, 2011 ).

2.3. Qualitative coding

The responses from Section 1 were coded using an inductive thematic analysis ( Braun & Clarke, 2006 ). Two raters (JF and AW) developed a set of descriptive codes from the dataset as a whole. Multiple iterations of the coding framework were discussed by the authors before the final version was applied to 20% of the dataset for independent coding by each rater. Once satisfactory inter-rater reliability had been reached ( k  = 0.79), the remainder of the dataset was independently coded by JF, with ambiguous cases flagged for discussion.

The coding scheme reflected four major themes in the data: firstly, concerning the dynamics of the experience, relating to how the writer experienced his/her characters; second, how the characters’ voices related to the writer’s own inner speech ; third, if dialogue with characters did occur, how such dialogue was experienced; and finally, if characters did appear to exhibit agency , how and when that agency appeared (see Table 2 for a full list of code definitions and frequencies). The inner speech codes, dialogue codes, and agency codes were exclusive – respondents could only receive one code from each of these code groups. All other codes were non-exclusive, although each respondent could only receive each code once.

Code definitions and frequencies.

3.1. Dynamics

Almost two thirds of writers in our sample reported hearing their characters’ voices (63%). In the majority of cases, this was clearly related to the sense of the character’s voice or appearance having distinctive characteristics (e.g. accent, gender, etc.).

I hear them in my mind. They have distinct voice patterns and tones, and I can make them carry on conversations with each other in which I can always tell who is ‘talking’. (R 35)

Often respondents would make explicit reference to their characters’ voices being imaginary, ‘in the head’, or ‘in the mind’s eye’; very few respondents suggested that their characters’ voices were the same as the voices of people actually present in the room. Over half of our sample (56%) reported visual or other sensory experiences of their characters, although responses varied greatly in terms of the ‘completeness’ of such imaginings:

I do sometimes see them, their bodies in particular; a way of standing, or turning, or another action. But I rarely, if ever, see the faces of my characters fully formed, hardly ever. (R 145)

Moreover, although 11% of respondents reported having felt the presence of their characters, this was usually described as occurring in the absence of any visual sense of the character:

I sense their presence as you sense somebody in a dream. They are very much known to me but only in peripheral vision and as an atmosphere or a force exerting itself. I wouldn’t be able to sit opposite a character, so to speak, and see them, talk to them etc. They aren’t something that can be interrogated or pinned down. (R 51)

Those writers who did not endorse hearing or seeing their characters sometimes gave explicit reasons for providing negative responses. Usually, the reason given was one of the following three: the writer was too conscious of embodying the characters’ voices to attribute those voices to the character; the writer experienced their characters more as narrative props or functions than personified agents; or the writer interpreted the question literally, and reserved ‘hearing’ and ‘seeing’ for experiences in other modalities:

Having found them, it’s then my job to embody them, which includes embodying their speech. This is not like listening, for me, nearly as much as it is like reading aloud […] I’m performing the people, I’m dramatising them (R 57)

I tend to think of my characters as narrative constructions rather than real people […] I don’t ‘hear’ those voices in my head. (R 59)

Variable – may be via any sense, but the sense is not experienced as real or in real time – more at the level of intensity that would be there in a memory (R 73)

Although respondents were not asked directly about experiential overlap, physical acting out, and observation, all three featured in writers’ attempts to describe how they experienced their characters. 22% of our sample reported that their imaginative experience of the storyworld occurred through their characters’ senses, as if they were sharing a physical body. In a few cases this was explicitly associated with being unable to see a character’s face:

If the character feels something I feel it, whether emotional or sensory. (R 40)

I often don’t see their faces precisely. Sometimes because I’m the character and I’m looking out, but often because I don’t really need to unless it’s important and I have to decide what they look like. It’s more like a dream in that sense. (R 38)

Physical acting out, which involved actually performing or rehearsing the speech and actions of characters, was reported by 11% of our sample. Often this feature was described as serving a distinct purpose:

I’ll play-act a dialogue between characters, in order to map out a scene in my head. (R 56)

Observation, on the other hand, tended to involve a sense of separation between writer and character, at least insofar as it involved watching or listening to characters from an external perspective. Often the writer would describe themselves as ‘just’ transcribing or recording events which they imagined observing, although in some cases the film or play metaphor used was extended to include their role as a ‘director’ or ‘editor’:

I can watch them going about their business in a kind of inner cinema screen often complete with dramatic score […] I find the imagined dialogue relatively easy to write it seems as if I just have to transcribe what they say. I can also rewind the inner tape and listen again if necessary (R 74)

I usually experience them as if I’m watching a disjointed film that I can play forwards and backwards, making small (or huge) changes to each scene and seeing alternative endings unfold in real time. […] I edit as I write, so the experience is of playing conversations as if using a suite of video-editing software – spooling forward and backwards. (R 168)

However, despite the apparent incompatibility of experiential overlap and observation, some respondents reported both kinds of experience. Usually this was because the writer referred to different experiences at different times, or experiences which related to different characters:

There is usually one character (always a central one) who feels like ‘me’ and I experience them from the inside out. Other characters I observe rather than inhabit. (R 114)

Over a third of writers reported experiencing their characters’ voices after having finished working on the narrative in which they appeared. Often these experiences were described as becoming increasingly attenuated or infrequent as time went by, and/or in terms of the characters being ‘replaced’ by characters from a new work. In a few cases, however, the characters persisted to such an extent that they affected or interfered with the writer’s new projects:

They live on but not in such a pressing way; they get superseded by the voices of other characters. (R 114)

They vanish mostly. Occasionally, with strong characters they come back later and mess up something that’s coming afterwards. A few of them will never go but they don’t get in the way. (R 120)

Finally, hallucinatory and hallucination-like experiences reported by writers in our sample (21%) varied considerably in their form and content. Most common were hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations (experienced while falling asleep or waking up), followed by single hallucinatory experiences and/or hallucinatory experiences during childhood. Some respondents who reported hallucinatory experiences stated that there was a noticeable qualitative difference between these experiences and their experiences of their characters.

I have experienced hypnagogic hallucinations […] These have mostly been aural in character and it’s a lot like eavesdropping in on conversations (the voices are never talking directly to me) […] I do actually hear them vividly, which is why I can be so emphatic about not hearing my characters at all. I have never heard them in this same physical way. (R 106)

I’ve had strong and convincing experiences of the presence of God. At least, I think I have: I described them, with the fatal consequence that it’s now difficult to remember what it was like apart from my description. Apart from the sense of needing to attend as purely and patiently as possible, without pre-emptive ordering that might close down what’s happening, I don’t think these experiences have very much in common with my experiences with characters. A different degree of otherness was involved. And I never heard a voice. (R 57)

Very few writers reported hallucinatory experiences which were in any way related to their characters:

I have heard character’s voices when I’ve been under extreme duress as well – once on a mountain, feeling as if I was unable to go forward or back, almost frozen with terror and vertigo, I clearly heard the voice of one of my characters telling me what to do, reassuring me and encouraging me to go on. (R 173)

3.2. Inner speech

Amongst those writers who did report hearing their characters’ voices, an important distinction emerged concerning the relationship that these writers described between their own inner speech and the characters’ voices. When stating that they heard their characters’ voices, some writers (30%) referred to their awareness of how the character’s voice sounded, or their sense of what the character would say in a given situation. For these writers, the character’s voice was not separate (or not separable) from their own inner speech, either because the character’s voice was a part of the writer’s inner speech, or because the character’s voice blurred the boundary between self and other:

I have a dual experience – I still have my own POV [point of view] but I have my characters’ too. (R 144)

It’s like when you see a dress in a shop window and you hear your mum’s voice saying ‘it won’t wash … ’ in your mind. It’s involuntary but not intrusive, and it’s not like hearing ‘real’ voices. Something like an invoked memory. […] I suppose it’s a kind of ventriloquism. Ultimately it’s me speaking to myself, but imagining/putting on a different voice to do it. (R 172)

By contrast, other writers (33%) stated that their characters’ voices were clearly distinct from their own inner speech. Often this distinction would be defined in terms of ownership, as if the character were a separate entity.

They feel ‘embodied’ in a way my own thoughts and interior monologues do not. They have an urgency and an ‘otherness’ – which I can sense rather than explain. (R 22)

They have a different voice to my own inner thoughts/speech; I can tell it’s a character and not me, and not just because of the subject matter. Also when my characters are running dialogue in my head I feel like a spectator, but with my own inner speech I feel like the one speaking. (R 122)

3.3. Dialogue

The most common form of dialogue with characters reported by our sample involved the writer speaking with a character directly (15%), with the character as a separate imaginary interlocutor. In some cases this form of dialogue was described as infrequent, or other forms were reported as being more common:

They sometimes tell me that what I have in mind for them isn’t right – that they would never behave or speak that way. I don’t usually answer back. (R 150)

I can ask them questions and they’d answer as if without my input, I haven’t done it much but when I do it works just as a normal conversation would do often times they do go off on a tangent. (R 29)

The remaining writers who reported engaging in dialogue with their characters were split between dialogue as character (8%) and dialogue as possible (8%). The former group contained responses which referred to the writer needing to take on the role of a character in order for dialogue to occur:

It’s not really me entering the dialogue, it’s me as another character so I can hear what they would say to each other. (R 104)

Dialogue as possible, on the other hand, was applied to responses in which the writer stated that they believed they could enter into dialogue with characters but that this was not ever actually practiced:

I can but I never do it. Still, when they surprise me by bending the conversation they are having with themselves or another character in an unexpected direction I might mutter: ‘So, that is what you are like.’ (R 26)

3.4. Agency

Although the majority of writers in our sample reported characters who exhibited their own agency (61%), there were substantial differences in terms of how and when this experience manifested. It was most common for writers to report that the agency of their characters only emerged after a certain point had been reached during the writing process (26%).

To begin with they feel under my control and then at that certain point when they feel completely real, it becomes a matter of me following them, hoping to steer. (R 100)

I nowadays just plan my books halfway as I know that in the middle of the writing process the characters will take over the story so my planning will become useless anyway. (R 41)

Although not as common, writers who described experiences of characters’ agency as infrequent or occasional also made up a substantial percentage of our sample (22%). In contrast to cases of temporally emergent agency, these responses gave no indication that the development of the narrative was necessary for characters to manifest agency, and therefore tended to implicitly or explicitly describe the phenomenon as unpredictable.

My characters can often swing the story in an unpredictable direction. Depending on the story, I can either rein them in or let them run with it. (R 152)

I LOVE it when my characters go off script. It’s one of my favourite parts of being a writer, and often these unexpected plot twists are the best of all. (R 37)

Finally, writers who reported characters’ agency without any indication of variability were least frequent in our sample (13%). However, these responses did not necessarily suggest that other aspects of the writing process were not under the writer’s control (e.g. situation, setting, etc.), only that the character was fully in control of their own speech/actions.

It’s the characters who make the thing happen. I can’t make them do what they don’t want to. (R 17)

I don’t think it’s ever a question of my telling them what to do. They just do what they do and I transcribe/describe their dialogue/actions. However, I set the parameters for their existence or activities – decide where they are located, who they are talking to etc. (R 106)

It is worth noting that several respondents who did not receive an agency code still reported being aware of not always consciously deciding aspects of the narrative and characters’ behaviour (including dialogue), but did not attribute agency to their characters:

[T]he characters are frames, sets of priorities and emotions with, if you like, narrative vectors. Those vectors in collision with external events and other characters will (must be engineered to) produce the story I want to tell. Sometimes the emergent pattern will take precedence over the plan; other times I will rework characters to push the narrative in the right direction. (R 36)

I find that whole thing of ‘my character just took over’ a bit cringey, to be honest. But then I am more of a plotter, so I like to know where I am going with a character. However, you can intend one thing, then find when you actually create the scene or circumstance, that your greater knowledge of your character suggests something better, more in keeping. (R 93)

Of course, writers who reported that their characters did exhibit agency often implicitly or explicitly affirmed that they knew their characters were imaginary (and aside from non-fiction writers, it was incredibly rare to find responses which positively affirmed any belief in the extra-textual ‘reality’ of characters). However, this awareness did not necessarily prevent the ‘illusion’ of experiencing characters’ agency from occurring.

3.5. Case studies – Variations in characters’ agency and alterity

R 157 – Characters exhibit agency and alterity

[I]n order to feel I really understand a character I have to be able to hear his/her voice in my head as if someone is speaking to me from outside my brain: if I feel like I’m creating what the character says, then the writing is rarely as good and it feels much more like an uphill battle. At the start of a book, I write more slowly and it’s much more painful as I’m still trying to ‘tune’ the characters in. As they start speaking in my head, it becomes easier and the writing speeds up and becomes more fun. […] I often see a ‘movie’ of the book as I write… but one I can move about in like the director, suggesting different dialogue (often a ‘conversation’ with the characters rather than an order) and moving things about as need be until the scene ‘runs’ right.

I tend to have a sense of how tall they are relative to me… And though I don’t see faces I do know roughly what they look like. I recognise real people mostly by their hair and specific memorable features so that carries over into what I see of my characters. Sometimes I see what they’re wearing – it depends if it’s important to me and them. I also have a sense of what it would feel like to be in a room with the characters – what their emotional ‘energy’ (for want of a better expression) is like at a given time. But mostly, unlike real people, they never feel like they’re standing too close to me!

My characters need to feel separate for me to hear their voices, which also means that when I’m trying to ‘put words in their mouth’ instead of listening they often talk back. And then we discuss things until I find what they would say. If I’m really stuck on the emotional transitions in the story, then listening to what the characters want to say is extremely important. […] I write in a way that’s equivalent to method acting: I have to be the character before I know what to write… and before I can listen to them as separate people in my head.

They definitely act of their own accord! And it’s usually best to let them. Plotting for me is as much about finding out *how* my Book-People get from A to B as deciding what I want the story to be about at the level of X happens and then Y. This is where a lot of the surprises in my work come from.

This response describes quite a well-developed sense of the character’s agency and alterity (the latter being a term from phenomenology which refers to that which is experienced as ‘not me’ or ‘other-than-me’ ( Overgaard & Henriksen, 2019 )). Alongside the separateness of the characters’ voices from the writer’s own inner speech, the writer observes her characters, has a sense of the characters’ presence, and sometimes enters into dialogue with characters as if they were separate entities. The characters’ agency is, moreover, explicitly linked to their alterity. What is particularly interesting in this case (and somewhat less common) is the way in which the agency of the characters only emerges after a process of inhabiting their perspectives: the writer shifts over time from ‘being’ certain characters to experiencing the fully-fledged independence of those characters in terms of both agency and alterity.

R 65 – Characters exhibit agency without alterity or additional dynamics

Once they are present, they engage in the action seemingly without any guidance. I don’t ‘hear’ them but I know what they’re saying, seeing, feeling, and I just write it down.

It [characters acting of their own accord] doesn’t happen all the time. It’s mostly to do with dialogue. Snatches of what they say jump into my head. This can progress the story in unexpected ways.

Sometimes I struggle to catch their voices and I know I haven’t ‘got’ the character yet. Sometimes I have to haul them back from places where they want to go but I don’t want them to. Sometimes they want to take over the story at the expense of the ‘main’ character and the plot I’m trying to pursue. It’s irritating when the demands of the plot force me to soften, alter, change, expunge a character. It’s very hard to get back into the swing of writing.

This writer provided negative responses to questions 2 and 3 (‘Do you ever hear your characters’ voices?’ and ‘Do you have visual or other sensory experiences of your characters, or sense their presence?’). In contrast to R 157, the experience of characters does not appear to involve the same kind or degree of quasi-sensory dynamics – instead, characters’ speech and actions are ‘known’ rather than observed. However, characters still appear to manifest agency, sometimes producing dialogue that does not feel consciously created. As with several other cases of occasional manifestations of characters’ agency, the writer acknowledges that the experience has a phenomenological profile which noticeably differs from experiences of characters when they are not manifesting agency. Particularly noteworthy in this response is the implication that these occasional manifestations of characters’ agency do not always take precedence over the writer’s plans for the narrative, since it was more common to find responses which suggested that characters’ actions that were apparently self-willed ought to take precedence over what the writer had consciously decided (i.e. ‘the character is always right’).

R 100 – Characters exhibit agency with additional dynamics but without alterity

[I experience my characters as] memories and daydreams, like I do people I have met in real life. Sometimes just visual, sometimes just audio, sometimes both.

It’s like questions or phrases that pop into my head that show me who the person is. They feel like memories of conversations, very similar to recollections of my real life. […] I am aware that I am generating the voices, even though I’m not sure what they will say. It’s like the best game ever.

I often make tea and run conversations between myself and a particular character, speaking both sides. Sometimes I enact my character and roleplay them making the tea and speaking their thoughts.

To begin with they feel under my control and then at that certain point when they feel completely real, it’s becomes a matter of me following them, hoping to steer.

I speak and write reams and reams of dialogue for everyone in all my stories. Conversations that couldn’t even logistically happen due to time barriers etc. too. I sometimes write a scene and then read it back and it’s almost like the character involved is saying to me, ‘I just wouldn’t do that, are you stupid?’

I think sometimes the character’s ‘voice’ can be as much a feeling as actually hearing words. I often picture characters sat waiting, looking at me like they’re saying, ‘Really? Is this what you’re going to make happen?’

I often hear the voice of my Grandmother in situations where a nugget of advice she would give me is particularly relevant.

As this response demonstrates, it was possible for writers to report experiencing their characters in a number of different ways, depending on the technique being used. However, here the writer does not describe his characters’ voices as being necessarily distinct from his own inner speech, in part because his inner speech already contains the voices of ‘other people’. In effect, the boundary between self and other is too blurred to suggest that the writer has any distinct impression of characters’ alterity – at least, not in the sense described by R 157. The forms of ‘interaction’ (i.e. dialogue) engaged in by the writer are also noticeably different, being more akin to a form of self-talk involving different perspectives than a conversation with an imaginary interlocutor. On the other hand, this writer also describes sometimes experiencing his characters in a manner similar to R 65: being aware of a character’s ‘voice’, and the intent behind it, without this necessarily involving an imaginative experience of the relevant (quasi-)sensory properties.

3.6. Associations within the writing experience: characters’ voices, inner speech, and agency

To examine these characteristics further, a series of chi-square analyses were run to compare the wider phenomenological characteristics of those (i) who did and did not endorse hearing their characters’ voices, (ii) those who described varying levels of the experience being distinct from their inner speech, and (iii) those who experienced their characters as having a notable degree of agency.

For hearing characters’ voices, associations were tested for the presence of visual characteristics, the feeling that the writer was observing their characters, engaging in a dialogue with characters, and the level of character agency (applying a Bonferroni correction across the four tests to reduce alpha to p  < 0.0125). Writers who experienced their characters’ voices were significantly likely to also experience their characters visually (χ 2  = 15.66, df  = 1, p  < 0.001), and to feel like they were observing their characters (χ 2  = 21.84, df  = 1, p  < 0.001). Experiencing character’s voices was also associated with them having any agency at all – whether occasionally, emerging over time, or fully (χ 2  = 21.01, df  = 3, p  < 0.001) – but not significantly with levels of dialogue (which failed to survive correction for multiple comparisons; χ 2  = 9.77, df  = 3, p  = 0.021).

Following this, we explored how the codes attributed for inner speech and characters’ voices (i.e. characters’ voices as fully distinct from inner speech, not distinct, or not there at all) picked out different patterns of experience. As above, chi-square tests were applied to our coding for observational experiences, dialogue, and agency, along with the addition of a further code: the sense of experiential overlap between writer and character. Those writers whose characters were fully distinct from their inner speech were significantly likely to report dialoguing as themselves with the character (χ 2  = 22.19, df  = 6, p  < 0.001), to feel like they were observing their characters (χ 2  = 32.15, df  = 2, p  < 0.001), and to experience their characters as possessing full agency (χ 2  = 28.29, df  = 6, p  < 0.001). In contrast, those who reported experiencing their characters’ voices, but without these voices being distinct from their inner speech, were also likely to describe their own experiences ‘overlapping’ with characters’ experiences in some way (χ 2  = 15.16, df  = 2, p  = 0.001).

We applied the same analysis to the coding for agency and its associations with observation and dialogue. Characters experienced as either fully agentic or whose agency emerged over time were significantly likely to be experienced in an observational way (χ 2  = 13.56, df  = 3, p  = 0.004). However, no association was seen between the capacity for dialogue and the characters’ perceived levels of agency (χ 2  = 13.52, df  = 9, p  = 0.140).

3.7. Associations with hallucination-proneness, imaginary companions, and everyday inner speech

Finally, we examined whether these distinctions regarding characters’ voices related to experiences outside of writing: namely hallucination-proneness (and specific reports of AVH), the presence or history of imaginary companions, and everyday experiences of inner speech (applying a Bonferroni correction across the seven tests to reduce alpha to p  < 0.007). Of the sample, 171 respondents completed all of the additional measures.

When writers with and without characters’ voices were compared, the former scored significantly higher for self-reported levels of hallucination-proneness on the LSHS ( t  = 2.826, df  = 169, p  = 0.005), although they were not more likely to report specifically AVH-like experiences in the survey itself (χ 2  = 2.58, df  = 1, p  = 0.109). For imaginary companions, only those with ( n  = 65) and without ( n  = 116) ICs during childhood were compared, as too few had current ICs (n = 10); nevertheless, no association was evident between having had an IC in the past or experiencing characters’ voices (χ 2  = 0.41, df  = 1, p  = 0.524). The four subscales of the VISQ were also examined: of these, only the experience of other people in inner speech was significantly elevated in those who experienced the voices of their characters ( t  = 2.863, df  = 169, p  = 0.005; all other p  > 0.250).

In addition to the distinction between writers who did and did not hear their characters’ voices, our qualitative analysis suggested that certain properties hung together, such as characters’ voices being distinct from inner speech, characters being observable, and characters exhibiting agency. In total 25 respondents (15%) had all three properties, constituting a group we defined as ‘high alterity’. Compared with the rest of the sample (and applying the same Bonferroni correction: p  < 0.007), the high alterity group did score significantly higher on the LSHS ( t  = 3.03, df = 169, p  = 0.003). There was also a non-significant trend for this group to be more likely to report AVH-like experiences in the survey itself, although this did not survive correction for multiple comparisons (χ 2  = 5.35, df  = 1, p  = 0.021). However, they were not more likely to have had an IC in the past, and the quality of their inner speech did not differ significantly from the rest of the sample.

4. Discussion

The first aim of this study was to survey the phenomenological qualities of writers’ experiences of their characters, particularly in relation to writers’ reports of ‘hearing’ characters’ voices. Although ‘hearing’ the voices of characters and experiencing characters as agentive were both fairly common amongst writers within our sample, these experiences were also varied and complex. The descriptions provided by respondents highlighted the multiple ways in which a character might be ‘heard’, ‘talked to’, and experienced as exhibiting independence.

Above all, the responses suggested an important distinction relating to whether (or not) characters manifested alterity , i.e. the extent to which they were experienced as separate or apart from the self ( Overgaard and Henriksen, 2019 , Zahavi, 1999 ). While it could be argued that, broadly speaking, any imagining of an ‘other’ necessarily entails a minimal sense of alterity, what we are concerned with here is the more pronounced sense of separation suggested by some of the responses. The features of writers’ experiences of their characters which indicated this latter sense of alterity include the experience of characters’ voices as distinct from the writers’ own inner speech (coming from outside the bounds of the self), and the experience of characters as capable of being observed or interacted with (separation from the self typically being a precondition for such activities). By contrast, other writers clearly did not experience their characters as exhibiting this form of alterity, often because their responses suggested a blurring of the boundary between self and other, or else because the character did not manifest the necessary features which would make interaction possible.

Those responses which indicated the alterity of characters would appear to support the analogy drawn between characters and imaginary companions ( Watkins, 1986 , Taylor et al., 2003 ), since these writers appeared to experience their characters as entities to be interacted with, or at least as manifesting a kind of alterity that would allow for such an interaction. In other words, for these writers, characters are experienced as sufficiently separate from the self to justify the comparison of a character to an imaginary ‘companion’, as opposed to being simply an imagining without this kind of external-to-self dimension. Of course, as with the imaginary companions of children ( Taylor & Mottweiler, 2008 ), this does not necessarily entail any belief in the reality of the characters on the part of the writer.

However, while there was a strong association between codes which suggested the alterity of characters and the sense of characters’ agency, the number of writers who reported characters’ agency was almost double that of writers whose responses indicated a sense of the characters’ alterity. Therefore, a large number of writers who did not observe their characters and who did not hear their characters’ voices as distinct from their own inner speech (or who did not hear their characters’ voices at all) still described their characters as exhibiting agency. This variation suggests that we should be wary of assuming an automatic (albeit intuitive) conflation of the two senses of ‘independence’ (as ‘separate’ and as ‘free’), especially since descriptions of characters’ agency did not necessarily refer to an imaginative experience of hearing or seeing the character as another agent in action . Instead, the experience of characters’ agency was often described as a sense of tension between the character and the plot, as a sudden awareness of ideas for the plot or snatches of dialogue which did not feel consciously determined, or as a sense of knowing how the character would behave in a given situation without having to consciously decide how the character would behave. Such experiences still appear to involve the sense of another’s agency, even if not accompanied by any concomitant sensory imaginings of that other in action. Note that this does not mean that sensory properties of characters are never imagined by these writers, but only that such quasi-sensory experiences do not appear to be a necessary feature of the experience of characters’ agency.

A possible parallel with such experiences of characters’ agency is to be found in voice-hearers’ descriptions of ‘soundless voices’, which involve a sense of receiving a message or meaning without any accompanying auditory properties Bleuler, 1911 , Janet, 1889 , Jones, 2010 , Larøi et al., 2012 . While these experiences might differ substantially in other respects, one possible area of overlap is the apparent experience of another’s agency without any accompanying sensory or quasi-sensory experience of that other. Accounting for this phenomenon, Wilkinson and Bell (2016) argue for the non-reflective (or ‘non-inferential’) detection and tracking of the agency of others ( Wilkinson & Bell, 2016 ). According to Wilkinson & Bell’s model, the form and modality of the experience of the other is incidental to the detection and representation of the other’s agency, given that human beings appear to be evolutionarily biased towards detecting and representing agents in their environments ( Barrett, 2000 ), and that contingency of behaviour appears to play a far more important role in agency attribution than the perceptual features of a perceived object ( Johnson, 2003 ). In effect, since the representation of an agent is not necessarily inferred from perceptual or quasi-perceptual phenomena which we know to be usual properties of agents (e.g., a voice, a body, a human face, etc.), the sense of the other’s agency is not necessarily dependent on an experience of the agent per se . 3 Indeed, the potential incorrigibility of our experiences of agents – the fact that we can still experience something as an agent even when we do not believe that it is an agent ( Johnson, 2003 ) – not only suggests that agent detection and representation is intuitive rather than inferential ( Wilkinson & Bell, 2016 ), but also appears particularly relevant to the ‘illusion’ of characters’ agency. According to this model, it is conceivable that the writer’s lack of conscious awareness of their own agency – such as might result from the automatic ( Taylor et al., 2003 ) or emergent ( Bernini, 2014 ) choices made during the writing process – could generate the illusion of characters’ agency even without being accompanied by any additional phenomenological features pertaining to those characters.

Another potentially similar experience is reported in Alderson-Day et al.'s (2017) study of readers, in which nearly a fifth of respondents described unbidden experiences of characters outside the context of reading. While this ‘experiential crossing’ sometimes involved simulations of a character’s speech, it more frequently contained instances of ‘mindstyle’ ( Fowler, 1977 , Semino, 2007 ) – a term from cognitive stylistics which refers to the linguistic rendering of the worldviews and cognitive habits of a particular character – or the more general deployment of a character’s ‘consciousness frame’ ( Palmer, 2004 ) – essentially a schema for the character’s perspective constructed during reading. As such, experiential crossing more often included characters’ thoughts and feelings as opposed to specifically quasi-perceptual elements, being ‘more like a habit of thinking or expectation of what a character would say in a given situation’ ( Alderson-Day et al., 2017 , p.107). Like writers’ reports of characters’ agency, readers’ awareness of the characters’ thoughts, feelings, or speech in response to extratextual situations appeared to be non-reflective, as opposed to being reached through deliberative empathising or reasoning about the characters’ mental states. As Alderson-Day et al. suggest, such experiences could be examples of the generation and deployment of ‘personality models’ used to predict (real-world) others’ behaviour in potential scenarios ( Hassabis et al., 2014 ). This understanding of experiences of characters’ agency could be expanded to include those writers who do hear their characters’ voices when considered in relation to certain theories of inner speech. According to a Vygotskian approach, the internalisation and articulation of others’ perspectives in dialogic inner speech make up an important part of higher cognition ( Fernyhough, 2008 ). Moreover, this does not only manifest as a more abstracted kind of perspective-taking; as the VISQ attempts to measure, there are varying degrees to which individuals are aware of their inner speech incorporating other people’s voices ( McCarthy-Jones & Fernyhough, 2011 ).

According to this approach, the experience of characters ‘acting of their own accord’ is not necessarily different in kind from our imaginings and predictions of the behaviour of real people, including the conscious awareness of other people’s voices in inner speech reported by some individuals. The sense of characters’ agency may arise because this experience is more noticeable and thus more noteworthy than automatically generated imaginings of real people, because (a) characters are fictional entities, and so the sense of their agency is arguably not diminished through comparison with the more conspicuous agency of a real individual with whom they share an identity, and (b) the later experience of automatic response generation which develops after a certain point contrasts with the experience of having to consciously decide how the character responds in the earlier stages of character creation. The preponderance of responses which described characters’ agency as temporally emergent or only occasionally manifesting would appear to support this notion, since these writers appeared to be aware of losing the sense of reflectively deciding how their characters acted. In effect, what becomes automatized is therefore not so much the general activity of pretence itself ( Taylor et al., 2003 ), but is instead the automatic prediction of particular characters’ responses to situations on the basis of having become familiar with their mental functioning, just as happens when we become better acquainted with real people ( Wittgenstein, 1980 , Hobson, 2002 , Herschbach, 2008 , Thomas and Fletcher, 2003 ). Indeed, several writers who described their characters’ agency as temporally emergent made this comparison explicitly (e.g., ‘There comes a point when that character is imaginatively real and I know them like you’d know a real person you’d met and consequently I can anticipate their behaviour’). Another parallel could be identified here with readers’ reports of experiential crossing, which similarly appear to involve the automatic deployment of a character’s consciousness frame ( Alderson-Day et al., 2017 ). The extent to which such experiences of characters’ agency also contain simulations of characters’ voices might conceivably vary in the same way that people can be aware of others’ perspectives or personality models being more or less fleshed out as ‘voices’ within their own everyday inner speech.

However, there may still be an important distinction to be drawn between writers who did and did not experience their characters with a high degree of alterity. As a whole, our sample of writers did not display any significant differences from other population samples on the three additional measures we included: prevalence of imaginary companions during childhood ( Fernyhough et al., 2019 ); the quality of inner speech on the VISQ ( McCarthy-Jones & Fernyhough, 2011 ), with the exception of the subscale which measures the experience of other people in inner speech (in which writers who heard their characters’ voices received higher scores); and hallucination-proneness on the LSHS ( McCarthy-Jones and Fernyhough, 2011 , Alderson-Day et al., 2017 ). Similarly, comparisons between writers who did and did not hear their characters’ voices showed no differences on the first two measures, apart from the ‘other people in inner speech’ subscale. Since respondents might have included their experiences of their characters’ voices as ‘other people’ in their inner speech, we are wary of assigning any importance to this difference, especially given that inner speech did not appear to differ in relation to any of the other subscales. However, those writers who heard their characters’ voices did receive a higher score on the LSHS than those who did not, while the group we defined as ‘high alterity’ (receiving the fully distinct from inner speech, observation, and agency codes) scored higher still. It is possible that more pronounced experiences of characters’ alterity are therefore related to a greater proneness to experiencing one’s imaginings in general as perceptual or quasi-perceptual phenomena. One important caveat, however, is that some writers who had ever had a hallucinatory experience in their lifetime stated that these experiences were noticeably different from their experiences of their characters’ voices.

4.1. Limitations

There are a number of limitations to consider when interpreting the results of the present study. This research is the largest mixed methods empirical investigation of a specific aspect of inner experience for which no established vocabulary exists; moreover, it investigates a population who are, by definition, expert in the metaphorical and figurative use of language. Analyses of these data were not, therefore, straightforward. While the online administration of a bespoke phenomenological questionnaire alongside the existing standardised measures was likely key to the successful recruitment of a sample size large enough for statistical analysis, the reliance on unverified self-report, cross-sectional design and inability to follow up with participants are obvious limitations of this research design. Anonymous participation and a corresponding lack of information about the participants’ professional profiles (notably genre and number of publications) make it impossible to speculate as to the existence or significance of differences between writers based either on their expertise or as reflected in their ‘outputs’. We also did not gather data on how long participants had been writing for, which might conceivably affect how their characters were experienced in terms of skill acquisition and automaticity.

Although limiting the study to writers presenting at the Edinburgh International Book Festivals ensured that participants were held in high esteem by members of the literary community, the sample cannot be said to be representative of writers generally. Both the invitation to respondents and the questionnaire were designed in relation to specific research objectives: investigating what writers meant when they reported ‘hearing’ the voices of their characters, and determining whether there were any differences between writers who did and did not report this phenomenon. It is therefore likely that writers who were disinterested in the idea of ‘experiencing’ characters declined to participate, and so it is not possible to estimate the extent to which our results are indicative of the prevalence of such experiences amongst writers more broadly. The study was also prompted by the language that some writers use in relation to their characters (e.g. ‘speaking’, ‘talking’, etc.), and so may not fully capture the complexity and multi-modality of writers’ experiences of their characters. Moreover, those aspects of writers’ experiences which only emerged during thematic analysis (such as experiential overlap and physical acting out) may be somewhat underreported, given that we did not directly ask about these experiences. While this is a possibility, asking direct questions can also lead to important facets of inner experience being missed: it can prompt demand characteristics, and can close down avenues of investigation by encouraging yes or no answers (see Woods et al., 2015 , for an example of a similar methodological approach in relation to AVHs). For these reasons, we chose to use a range of open and closed questions to elicit as wide a range of responses as possible.

A final concern is the potential for content overlap in the different constructs being measured by the questionnaires. This is particularly so for the VISQ subscale of ‘other people in inner speech’, since it may be the case that authors endorsing these items were simply re-describing the tendency to experience their characters’ voices. The VISQ is aimed more broadly at inner speech experiences in everyday life, and refers to other people, such as family members, rather than anyone who could be construed as fictional or imaginary ( McCarthy-Jones & Fernyhough, 2011 ). Nevertheless, we must treat the finding that writers who hear their characters’ voices received a higher score on this measure with caution. To clarify the issue, future work would need to make more careful distinctions regarding inner speech inside and outside the writing process.

Notwithstanding these limitations, the present study is, to our knowledge, the only survey of writers’ experiences of their characters which attempts to address the phenomenological complexity of these experiences within a large professional sample. Our results reveal a noticeable degree of heterogeneity which further research into this phenomenon should take into account. First, it would appear that while a small subset of writers do have pronounced experiences of their characters as entirely separate and self-determining agents, they are not particularly representative of writers’ experiences in general, not least because the agency and alterity of characters did not necessarily go hand in hand. Second, while there do seem to be some areas of overlap between writers’ experiences of their characters and analogous experiences of non-actual entities, there are also important phenomenological differences which should perhaps make us wary of relying on a singular explanatory model. Above all, the complexity of writers’ experiences of their characters highlights the need for a more refined conceptual framework for understanding our interactions with actual and non-actual agents in general, with implications for the wider field of social cognition. Many characters may indeed talk back, but not all will; systematic investigation of this phenomenon in a range of writers will allow for a fuller exploration of the boundaries of social cognition, imagination, and the sense of agency.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

John Foxwell: Methodology, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing. Ben Alderson-Day: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing, Funding acquisition. Charles Fernyhough: Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing - review & editing, Funding acquisition. Angela Woods: Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing, Supervision, Funding acquisition.

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the Wellcome Trust, UK (WT098455 & WT108720). The authors would like to thank the Edinburgh International Book Festival for their support for the project.

1 For example, one poet stated: ‘I can hear them talking in my head, and it’s a strange hybrid of me and a separate personality’ ( R 62 ), while a historical biographer wrote that ‘It is a real challenge to imagine someone speaking to you from across the centuries […] It’s an extraordinary experience when it happens and can be almost like a private interview with, say, one of the world’s greatest conquerors’ ( R 181 ). As with fiction writers, there was substantial variation within these groups, but neither was large enough to allow for subdividing them further.

2 The 2014 survey used a 5-point Likert scale, the results of which were scaled up to match with the 2018 survey. The additional response options were added in the 2018 survey as part of the development of the VISQ-R (Alderson-Day et al., 2018).

3 As Wilkinson & Bell put it, according to this view ‘it would be possible to experience something as an agent  prior  to being consciously aware of any of its perceivable properties’ ( Wilkinson & Bell, 2016, p. 113).

Literary Character

• Child Development
• Developmental Psychology
• Social Interaction
• Social Psychology

Although many students would rather be watching TV or playing video games than working through classic tomes, science has documented how a steady dose of books can fuel their academic success, vocabulary, and reading comprehension.

But a number of studies suggest that books — and specifically literary fiction — can also affect social skills, emotional intelligence, and behavior throughout life. As Canadian novelist and psychological scientist Keith Oatley, an APS Fellow, has written, stories appear to offer a deeply felt simulation of social experience, expanding our understanding of ourselves and others.

Evidence suggests that these effects may germinate when children are first exposed to storybooks, but before they even learn to read — when they’re simply listening to stories from books. In a 2009 study, Israeli educational researchers Dorit D. Aram and Sigalit Aviram found that children of mothers who were knowledgeable about children’s fiction were more likely to be rated by teachers as empathic and emotionally well adjusted. And a 2010 study led in Canada by York University psychologist Raymond A. Mar, a prolific researcher on the link between narratives and social abilities, found that preschoolers whose parents were better at recognizing the titles and authors of children’s books scored better on measures of theory of mind — the complex skill of understanding other people’s mental states.

These studies, however, are based on inference. More recently, educational researchers have directly linked children’s reading and social development. A team led by Judith Lysaker of Purdue University conducted an experimental intervention with 22 second- and third-grade students who were exhibiting difficulties with both reading comprehension and social relationships. The children participated in a reading group that focused not only on understanding the text but also on exploring the thoughts, intentions, and emotions of the characters in the books. For example, the students were asked to write a letter from a particular character’s perspective.

As reported in 2011 in the journal Reading Psychology, assessments done before and after the reading intervention showed significant improvements in the participants’ reading comprehension and in their ability to imagine the emotions of others.

The Role of Genre

Research with adults suggests that such broadening in perspective isn’t evoked by just any novel or short story. In a study published last year in Science , psychologists David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano of the New School for Social Research found that reading literature improves intuitive abilities. But that effect appeared to apply only to what they describe as literary fiction — not the mysteries, thrillers, and other popular books that often sit atop bestseller lists.

Kidd and Castano performed five experiments to measure the effect of reading literary fiction on participants’ theory of mind (ToM). To choose texts for their study, Kidd and Castano relied on expert evaluations to define three types of writing: literary fiction, popular fiction, and nonfiction. They had each participant read excerpts from one of three genres:

• recent National Book Award finalists or winners of the 2012 PEN/O. Henry Prize for short fiction;
• popular fiction drawn from Amazon.com bestsellers or an anthology of recent popular fiction; or
• nonfiction works from the Smithsonian magazine.

Afterward, the researchers tested the participants’ ToM capabilities using several well-established measures. One of these measures is the “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” test, which asks participants to look at black-and-white photographs of actors’ eyes and indicate the emotion expressed.

Across the five experiments, Kidd and Castano found that participants who were assigned to read literary fiction performed significantly better on the ToM tests than did participants assigned to the other experimental groups. And the effect held after controlling for the readers’ age, gender, education, and mood.

The study suggests that not just any fiction helps foster ToM. Unlike popular fiction, literary fiction requires intellectual engagement and creative thought from its readers, Kidd and Castano assert.

“Features of the modern literary novel set it apart from most bestselling thrillers or romances,” they wrote. “Through the use of … stylistic devices, literary fiction defamiliarizes its readers. Just as in real life, the worlds of literary fiction are replete with complicated individuals whose inner lives are rarely easily discerned but warrant exploration.”

Neutralizing Bias

According to a study led by psychology researcher Dan Johnson, the exploration of fictional characters’ inner lives may even help counter certain racial, ethnic, and cultural biases. Johnson, an assistant professor of psychology at Washington and Lee University, assigned a subset of 68 study participants to read an excerpt from the 2009 novel Saffron Dreams by Shaila Abdullah. The story’s protagonist, a counter-stereotypical Muslim woman, is attacked by a group of male teenagers who spew racial and ethnic slurs at her. The other participants simply read a synopsis of the excerpt, devoid of descriptive prose and dialogue.

Next, the researchers showed the participants a series of pictures of ambiguous-race faces and asked them to rate them as either Arab, Caucasian, mixed but mostly Arab, or mixed but mostly Caucasian.

The participants who read the actual excerpt were more likely than the synopsis readers to categorize people as mixed race, rather than identifying them as either Arab or Caucasian. In essence, racial categories became less salient for them after they read Abdullah’s story.

In a second experiment, Johnson and his colleagues recruited 110 students online and had them read either the excerpt of the novel, a brief synopsis, or a separate piece about the history of the automobile. Afterwards, the participants viewed 12 images of the ambiguous-race faces expressing varying levels of anger. Again, the students were asked to assign each face to one of the same four categories used in the earlier study. Participants who read the synopsis or the history piece tended to categorize the most intensely angry faces as Arab. But those who read Abdullah’s narrative showed no such bias.

This led Johnson and his team to conclude that artfully written, evocative fiction helps people identify with characters from different cultures — and thus disrupts readers’ tendency to stereotype and judge.

This doesn’t mean that a good page-turner is devoid of psychological effects. Scientists at Emory University have found that reading a compelling novel may cause changes in the brain that reflect readers’ immersion in the story. Led by neuroscientist Gregory S. Berns, the researchers had 21 college students read Pompeii, a piece of historical fiction written by Robert Harris and published in 2003. The book, which revolves around a young man’s efforts to save the woman he loves as Mount Vesuvius erupts in ancient Italy, was selected specifically because of its dramatic plot.

For 5 days, the participants underwent daily functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans while at rest. Over the next 9 days, the students read portions of the book until they finished, undergoing additional fMRI scans every morning. Their brains also were scanned for 5 days after they finished the book.

In looking at the scan results, Berns and his colleagues detected heightened activity in regions of the brain associated with physical sensation and movement. Those types of changes suggested that reading fiction — any fiction — mentally transports us into the body of the protagonist.

What’s more, the neurological changes continued for 5 days after participants finished reading, revealing that the effect wasn’t fleeting, the researchers said.

Chekhov-Induced Change 

Another study indicates that the story itself may be less important than its mere status as fictional or nonfictional. Researchers Maja Djikic, Sara Zoeterman, Jordan Peterson, and Oatley gave 166 people a battery of questionnaires that included standard personality measures and questions about their current emotional states. They were then randomly assigned to one of two conditions. Those in the “art” condition read “The Lady With the Dog,” a classic short story by Anton Chekhov about an adulterous affair between a Russian banker and a woman he meets while vacationing in Yalta.

Participants in the control condition read the same tale, only rewritten to appear as a nonfictional report of proposed divorce proceedings. The researchers made every effort to make sure the plot remained almost identical. The control text had the same length, content, and complexity as Chekhov’s original, and readers found it just as interesting.

After reading the stories, all the participants were given another round of questionnaires, including the same personality and emotional measures they took at the beginning of the experiment.

The researchers found that the people assigned to the “art” condition showed more changes in personality traits compared with those who read the nonfiction version of the story. What’s more, each person’s change was unique, affected by the emotions he or she was feeling while reading.

“While it might seem surprising, this study demonstrates the turn-of-the-century prose by Chekhov can make university undergraduates experience and report themselves as more different than those who read a documentary-style text with the same content,” the research team wrote in a chapter of the book Directions in Empirical Literary Studies (2008). “By projecting ourselves into fictional stories and the minds of fictional characters, we open ourselves up to greater possibilities for who we may become.”

But how robust are these effects on children and adolescents? Does reading fiction affect them the same way that novels appear to influence adults?

In a 2008 article in Perspectives on Psychological Science , Mar and Oatley acknowledge that children may have difficulty comprehending subtext and metaphor, but point to research showing that they can still hone some of their social reasoning skills by reading storybooks. Nevertheless, the researchers agree that empirical links between story reading and social development are spotty and should be studied in more depth.

Recent research has, however, signaled that certain forms of fiction can engage even the most excitable, distractible children. Take youngsters who show a high tendency toward sensation seeking, a personality trait that APS Fellow Marvin Zuckerman identified to describe people who possess a heightened need for stimulation. High sensation seekers (HSS) are drawn to novel, emotionally complex experiences, which can sometimes lead to deviant behaviors like drug use and aggression. In a 2011 study involving fourth- and fifth-grade students, Purdue University researchers found that HSS children overall were less apt to enjoy the passive act of leisure reading. But if those students read more exciting or suspenseful narratives, they were just as likely to enjoy reading as their low-sensation-seeking peers.

At first glance, the fantasy novels and outer-space thrillers that are thought to better engage sensation seekers might be regarded as lacking in depth. It’s assumed that students get far more poignancy out of To Kill a Mockingbird than Divergent .

But in their 2008 article, Mar and Oatley argue that even books populated by wizards, dragons, vampires, and aliens can strive to depict important aspects of the human experience.

“A science-fiction novel that takes place on a distant space station,” they wrote, “may have greater psychological realism than does a pulpy novel set in modern times in a familiar locale.” œ

References and Further Reading

Aram, D. & Aviram, S. (2009). Mothers’ storybook reading and kindergartners’ socioemotional and literacy development. Reading Psychology, 30 ( 2), 175–194. doi: 10.1080/02702710802275348.

Bal, P. M. & Veltkamp, M. (2013). How does fiction reading influence empathy? An experimental iInvestigation on the role of emotional transportation. PLoS ONE 8 (1): e55341. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0055341.

Berns, G. S., Blaine, K., Prietula, M. J. & Pye, B. E. (2013). Short- and long-term effects of a novel on connectivity in the brain. Brain Connectivity, 3 (6): 590–600. doi:10.1089/brain.2013.0166.

Djikic, M., Oatley, K., Zoeterman, S. & Peterson, J. B. (2009). On being moved by art: How reading fiction transforms the self. Creativity Research Journal, 21 (1), 24–29. doi: 10.1080/10400410802633392

Jensen, J., Imboden, K., Ivic, R. (2011). Sensation seeking and narrative transportation: High sensation seeking children’s interest in reading outside school. Scientific Studies of Reading, 15 (6), 541–558.  doi: 10.1080/10888438.2010.528819

Johnson, D. R., Huffman, B. L., Jasper, D. M. (2014). Changing race boundary perception by reading narrative fiction. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 36 (1), 83–90.

Kidd, D. C., Castano, E. (2013). Reading literary fiction improves theory of mind. Science, 342 (6156), 377–380. doi: 10.1126/science.1239918

Lysaker, J. T., Tonge, C., Gauson, D., Miller, A. (2011). Reading and social imagination: What relationally oriented reading instruction can do for children. Reading Psychology, 32( 6), 520–566.

Mar, R. A., Oatley, K. (2008). The function of fiction is the abstraction and simulation of social experience. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3 (3), 173–192.

Mar, R. A., Tackett, J., Moore, C. (2009). Exposure to media and theory-of-mind development in preschoolers. Cognitive Development, 25 , 69 – 78. doi:10.1016/j.cogdev.2009.11.002.

Speer, N. K., Reynolds, J. R., Swallow, K. M., Zacks, J. M. (2009). Reading stories activates neural representations of visual and motor experiences. Psychological Science, 20 (8), 989–999. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02397.x

I found this article both interesting and useful as it points out how fiction can be just as useful to the learning process as fact. I remembered some earlier experiences in my life where I learned something from fiction.

APS regularly opens certain online articles for discussion on our website. Effective February 2021, you must be a logged-in APS member to post comments. By posting a comment, you agree to our Community Guidelines and the display of your profile information, including your name and affiliation. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations present in article comments are those of the writers and do not necessarily reflect the views of APS or the article’s author. For more information, please see our Community Guidelines .

Please login with your APS account to comment.

About the Author

Scott Sleek is Director of News & Information at APS. He can be contacted at [email protected].

Teaching: Ethical Research to Help Romania’s Abandoned Children 

An early intervention experiment in Bucharest can introduce students to the importance of responsive caregiving during human development.

Silver Linings in the Demographic Revolution 

Podcast: In her final column as APS President, Alison Gopnik makes the case for more effectively and creatively caring for vulnerable humans at either end of life.

Communicating Psychological Science: The Lifelong Consequences of Early Language Skills

“When families are informed about the importance of conversational interaction and are provided training, they become active communicators and directly contribute to reducing the word gap (Leung et al., 2020).”

Privacy Overview

Photo by Stephan Vanfleteren/Panos

How to create compelling characters

It’s not only writer’s intuition. use personality psychology to create just the right blend of surprise and believability.

by Kira-Anne Pelican   + BIO

is a writer, educator and script consultant, specialising in helping writers develop more compelling films and TV series through insights from evidence-based psychology. She is the author of The Science of Writing Characters (2020). She lives in London.

Edited by Christian Jarrett

Need to know

It’s first thing in the morning, I’ve plenty to do but I can’t stop thinking about Nicole Kidman’s character from the American TV series I watched last night, The Undoing . It’s a psychological thriller, and Kidman was mesmerising. When written well, characters seize our attention and compel us to engage. They stay in our minds long after we’ve closed the pages of our novel, binge-watched the entire box set, or exited the auditorium. We mull over their relationships, wonder if they did the right thing, and ponder how they might behave in different scenarios. But why is it that some characters are more compelling than others?

Perhaps you’re a writer struggling to create your own captivating characters. Or maybe you’re an avid consumer of novels, films and TV dramas and you’re intrigued that made-up people can cast such a spell on you. Either way, I believe that scientific psychology can offer a fresh, illuminating perspective and I’m going to show you how.

There are drawbacks to the traditional approach

Many books that discuss the craft of writing fiction suggest that the best approach towards creating engaging characters is by ensuring that they are believable, complex and flawed. Suggestions typically include drawing on personal observation, giving the main character conflicting conscious and unconscious goals, and developing an interesting character backstory. One of the most influential books of this genre is Aspects of the Novel (1927) by the English author E M Forster. In it, he argued that the most engaging characters move us emotionally because they feel real, and continue to surprise us as we turn the pages of the text. Describing these complex characters as ‘round’, Forster included as prime examples Madame Bovary, the romantic heroine from Gustave Flaubert’s novel of the same name, as well as characters written by Jane Austen.

By contrast, Forster proposed that ‘flat’ characters have just two or three pronounced character traits, can be summarised by a single sentence, and are incapable of moving us in any way other than through humour. When confined to secondary roles, these flat characters support the main story without distracting the reader. However, to Forster, the most compelling characters capture the full complexity of being human. They also transform and surprise us in believable ways.

Along with Forster, many other writerly guides offer similar advice about the importance of creating complexity in characters – but what is ‘complexity’ in this context, and how do we go about creating characters who are at once surprising but psychologically credible? As a psychology graduate-turned-writer, these questions intrigued me during my doctoral research. Early in my writing career, I received notes on one of my screenplays from a respected script consultant. They were full of excellent observations and useful suggestions, except on the area of character. I was in full agreement that my character needed more complexity and was missing something, but these comments alone were too vague to be useful. What I needed was to better understand what complexity means in a character, and with that to recognise what specifically was missing from my character and how to go about fixing it.

Personality psychology offers another way

Although some literary critics have resisted the idea that fictional characters are anything more than textual constructions (ie, a writer’s device or tool), an alternative approach – and one that I find far more useful for practitioners – is to treat them as akin to real people. Since most writers intend for their fictional characters to be proxies of their human counterparts, it arguably makes sense to examine and understand their characters through many of the same scientific models used by psychologists to understand real people. More specifically, the field of personality psychology is likely to be especially illuminating because writers characterise their fictional personae by describing their thoughts, feelings, motivations and behaviours – the exact same set of factors that psychologists see as making up personality.

The most widely supported scientific model of personality is the ‘Big Five’. The approach originated with the US psychologists Ernest Tupes and Raymond Christal, and was further developed by Paul Costa and Robert McCrae and others. These pioneers built on the idea that the attributes of personality that we consider to be most important must be encoded in everyday language. They used factor analysis on personality survey data to reveal five broad semantic groupings among the words that we use to describe each other, and these have become the Big Five traits or personality dimensions: extraversion-introversion, agreeableness-disagreeableness, neuroticism-emotional stability, conscientiousness-unconscientiousness, and openness to experience-closed to experience. The idea is that these dimensions are independent of each other, so the degree to which a person rates on one dimension has no bearing on how they rate on any other dimension.

By applying this framework to our understanding of what roundedness means in relation to fictional characters, we gain an immensely useful approach for fictional character analysis and problem solving. This five-factor model allows writers to examine whether they’ve characterised their fictional personae across all five dimensions of personality, and whether they’ve achieved this consistently enough through their text to create the sense of another being. In addition, the Big Five model illuminates the way that people typically transform throughout their lives ­– writers can use this knowledge to create more believable character transformations in fiction, and consumers of fiction might find it intriguing to reflect on the evolution of their favourite characters in the context of what’s known about real-life personality change.

The Big Five model also gives us insights into why some characters are more compelling than others. In reality, the range of scores across all personality dimensions are normally distributed in a population (similar to height or weight), and so the majority of people that we meet are moderately extraverted, moderately agreeable, moderately conscientious, moderately neurotic and moderately open to experience. They’re likely to make less of an impression because they’re rather average. By contrast, people are more likely to stand out from the crowd if they score towards the extremes of at least one or two of the dimensions. Such characters are compelling because they’re unlike the majority of people we meet every day. Whether real or imagined, we’re more likely to remember these individuals, precisely because they’re different.

Audit your character on the Big Five dimensions

When meeting someone for the first time, often the first personality dimension to make an impression on us is extraversion . Extraverts are outward-facing and gain energy from their social interactions. Full of life, they seize the limelight and compel us to watch. They’re generally warm, gregarious, active, assertive and upbeat characters who are drawn to excitement. Fictional examples are plentiful – from Becky Sharp, the cynical social climber from William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel Vanity Fair (1847-48), through the inventor-cum-superhero Tony Stark from the Marvel Cinematic Universe film franchise (2008-) . At the other end of this spectrum, introverts are more serious in nature, and gain energy from spending quiet time alone or in the company of close friends or family. While extraverts use big, assertive actions and extensive dialogue to grab our attention, introverts can be equally compelling precisely because they reveal so little. Written well, they’ll leave the reader wanting to discover more about them. Take, for example, Mr Darcy, Elizabeth Bennet’s aloof romantic interest from Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice (1813), or Little/Chiron/Black, the highly sympathetic son of a crack addict from the Academy Award-winning film Moonlight (2016).

A second dimension that we pick up rapidly in others is agreeableness . People who are agreeable are typically kind, trusting, cooperative, straightforward, humble and tenderminded – qualities that we generally like in others. We repeatedly see these traits in sympathetic characters such as Samwell Tarly, steward on the Night Watch in George R R Martin’s fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire (1996-), and the female lead in Woody Allen’s romantic comedy Annie Hall (1977). By contrast, disagreeable people are typically more selfish, opinionated, suspicious, competitive, arrogant and sometimes devious. Unsurprisingly, antagonists will usually score highly on disagreeableness. However, some subtraits associated with disagreeableness are also useful in creating strong protagonists. Think about the leading character Mildred Hayes from the BAFTA Award-winning film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017). Blunt, single-minded and without any concern for who she’s going to offend on her way, Hayes wins over our sympathies when we learn that she’s fighting for justice for her daughter who was raped and murdered. Strength of character often comes from the determination to fight for what’s right and a refusal to compromise.

A third dimension, neuroticism , relates to the way that we experience the world emotionally. People who score higher on neuroticism tend to be more sensitive to life’s ups and downs. They’re typically more prone to anxiety, anger-hostility and depression. They feel more vulnerable, self-conscious and impulsive. In fictional characters, these qualities are often ideal for dramas that focus on the protagonist’s internal journey. Take, for example, the character of the faded Hollywood actor Riggan Thomson from the Academy Award-winning drama Birdman (2014), whose narrative is driven by his emotional vulnerability and desperate need for critical recognition. At the other end of the spectrum are emotionally stable characters who behave as though they can handle anything that the world throws at them. For this reason, the vast majority of action heroes and heroines rate highly on emotional stability.

On a fourth dimension, people who rate highly on conscientiousness are driven by a sense of duty and responsibility. They tend to feel competent; they’re cautious, deliberate thinkers; they’re organised, self-disciplined and goal-driven. As fictional examples, we can call upon characters ranging from William Shakespeare’s Macbeth to the chemistry teacher-turned-drug manufacturer Walter White from the Emmy Award-winning TV series Breaking Bad (2008-13). While being goal-driven, or high on achievement-striving, is useful for many genre protagonists, there are plenty of equally engaging characters at the other end of this dimension. Unconscientious characters tend to be more spontaneous and free-spirited. In a world where we’re taught to be responsible and dutiful, their complete lack of responsibility is often fascinating. As examples, take Ignatius J Reilly, the eccentric and philosophical protagonist from John Kennedy Toole’s novel A Confederacy of Dunces (1980) or John Bennett, the man who refuses to grow up in the American feature comedy Ted (2012).

The final Big Five dimension is openness to experience . People who are open to experience tend to be imaginative; they love trying new things and they’re intellectually curious. They’re interested in different ideas and values, and they typically enjoy the arts and culture. Examples include the middle-aged stockbroker Charles Strickland from W Somerset Maugham’s novel The Moon and Sixpence (1919), who leaves his family to become an artist. At the other end of this dimension, people who are closed to experience tend to be narrow-minded and closed to new ideas. They instead prefer the down-to-earth, familiar, traditional and close-to-home. Examples from fiction include the no-nonsense governess Miss Pross from Charles Dickens’s novel A Tale of Two Cities (1859) and the matriarch Violet Crawley from the British TV drama Downton Abbey (2010-15). Pit a character who is open to experience against another who is closed to experience, and sparks will fly.

Applying the Big Five model to Nicole Kidman’s character, Grace Fraser, the clinical psychologist in private practice from the TV series The Undoing (2020), her most compelling qualities relate to her introversion, conscientiousness and emotional stability. The character’s deep interiority is intriguing, and together with her strength of character and emotional vulnerability, there is an unpredictability to her behaviour that’s compelling to watch. We’re given the sense that she might be holding secrets, and keeping important decisions to herself. Combined with her high conscientiousness, it’s evident that she’s wrestling with a sense of duty to do the right thing by her son, as well as her husband, and that these potentially conflicting motivations are pulling her apart. It’s just a shame that the series’ narrative arc isn’t as good as her characterisation.

Spend time getting to know your character

As a writer, if you aren’t yet experiencing your character clearly in your mind, try drawing on observation from life. Whether or not you’ve consciously drawn your characters from the qualities of people around you, it often helps to return to observation from life when you need more details in the character that you’re developing. That could mean jotting down someone’s mannerisms, speech patterns, particular words that they use or even events that have influenced them. There’s research out there on how the Big Five traits correlate with everyday behaviours – even the way that people walk and their physical presence. For instance , muscular, more physically imposing men tend to score higher in extraversion – you could use these kind of associations to inspire your imagination, for instance to make your portrayals more realistic or more surprising and extraordinary.

Another option is to try casting your character or creating a mood-board of headshots representing the way that you imagine them. Don’t feel restricted to using pictures of actors – images of people that you’ve found online could be equally helpful. Intriguingly, there’s evidence that we can accurately assess every personality dimension apart from conscientiousness from a neutral image of a person’s face; a mood-board of headshots could allow you to visually discover new aspects of their personalities that you had otherwise been struggling to identify.

Take your time. Getting to know your character is generally a process that requires plenty of reflection. Published novelists who took part in a recent study by Durham University in conjunction with the Edinburgh International Book Festival reported that it took time before they started to experience their characters as though they had independent agency and to feel as though they were coming alive in their minds. For some writers, this might not happen until halfway through their first draft.

Consider how your readers will emotionally engage with your character

Some characters are compelling because we sympathise with their predicament or elements of their backstory. For example, one of the characters already mentioned, Mildred Hayes from Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri , gains our sympathy when we learn that she’s fighting for justice for her daughter who was murdered. Research suggests that this is more likely to happen if we judge a character to be good, or at least the best in a bad bunch. We might also admire some of their qualities: personality traits related to being high in agreeability are generally liked by others, as are humour and intelligence. If we like a character, we’re more inclined to root for them and to empathise with their situation. The more we empathise with a character, the stronger the emotions we typically feel in response to their experiences. However, we can also connect with characters for other reasons than liking them, for instance if we find them intriguing. These characters might be impulsive, behave in unpredictable or particularly risky ways. Alternatively, they might tell lies or hold secrets that disturb and fascinate us. If your character offers none of the above, then it’s unlikely that they’ll hold the reader’s interest for very long.

If your character transforms, ensure that this transformation is believable

Although our personalities are generally considered to be stable and consistent, longitudinal research that followed the same individuals over decades has shown that our traits tend to mature throughout life. An average person will become a little more emotionally stable and agreeable through life, their conscientiousness will peak in mid-life, and their extraversion and openness to experience will decline the older they become. These are averaged effects, so many individuals will buck the trend, however it might be useful to know about the general patterns when portraying a character across an entire lifetime. Indeed, we often see similar character arcs in fiction, although they’re usually condensed into a shorter time period.

Just as in real life, readers will also expect characters to be transformed by emotionally intense life events, whether they’re positive or negative, because such events provide people with a sense of meaning and identity. Returning to the example of the character Mildred Hayes, the murder of her daughter motivates her single-minded quest for justice and provides her with a reason for living. While particularly traumatic events leave many people deeply scarred, others can thrive after experiencing a very stressful event. In The Theory of Everything (2014), the biographical film about the theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, there’s the suggestion that his diagnosis with motor neurone disease leads his character to seize every moment and live life to its fullest. It could be said that, after receiving the terminal illness diagnosis, this character experiences post-traumatic growth, in which people report finding new meaning in their lives and having closer, more fulfilling relationships.

High points in our lives also have the possibility of changing us for the better. In the children’s classic novel The Secret Garden (1911) by Frances Hodgson Burnett, the life of the 10-year-old protagonist Mary is vastly enriched by her discovery of the eponymous garden. It opens her eyes to the world and the feelings of others around her. Research suggests that it’s the emotional intensity of these life events, both good and bad, that has the power to transform us. So, when writers feature such powerful life experiences in their narratives, they aren’t only dramatic but also believable precipitants of character change.

Key points – How to create compelling characters

• There are drawbacks to the traditional approach . Writers are typically coached to create complex characters, but with little detail on how to do this. Creating credible yet surprising characters is a particular conundrum.
• Personality psychology offers another way . The ‘Big Five’ model from personality psychology provides a comprehensive framework for reflecting on characterisation. The five main personality dimensions are at the very core of character, and shape how a character is likely to engage with the world, relate to others, experience the world emotionally, deal with responsibilities, and even speak.
• Audit your character on the Big Five dimensions . Great stories begin with complex characters. Ensure that you capture this complexity in your characters by showing their behaviour on the subtraits that they express most strongly across all five main dimensions of personality – extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, conscientiousness, and openness to experience. Since the most memorable characters are unforgettable because they’re different, reflect on how your characters stand out from the crowd.
• Spend time getting to know your character . This is a process that requires plenty of reflection. It often helps to return to observation from life when you need more details in the character that you’re developing – such as their mannerisms, speech patterns, particular words that they use, or even events that have influenced them.
• Consider how your readers will emotionally engage with your character . If we like a character, we’re more inclined to root for them and to empathise with their situation. The more we empathise with a character, the stronger the emotions we typically feel in response to their experiences.
• If your character transforms, ensure that this transformation is believable . If you show your character expressing a variety of different traits at different times without any consistency, your reader will struggle to understand who this character is. Conversely, out-of-character behaviours that make sense given your character’s context and backstory are the most revealing and compelling to read. Use emotionally intense life events as catalysts of change for your character’s transformation.

As E M Forster noted, the most compelling characters aren’t just round or dimensional, they surprise us in believable ways. The Big Five dimensions of personality describe the consistent patterns of thoughts, feelings and behaviours that we experience when we’re feeling at our most ‘authentic’, but in reality of course the majority of people exhibit fairly wide variations in their behaviour that often appear to be contradictory and even incompatible.

So, while our traits will play out over the longer term, our thoughts, feelings and behaviours are also influenced by our moods and emotions, our social context and our internal goals. Much of the consistency that we experience in our own and other people’s behaviour – that is, what we see as our and their personality – is situation-dependent . Extraverts who are usually the life and soul of the party when they’re in social situations might well be quiet and reflective when work requires, or when they’re upset or in a bad mood. Introverts who are usually most comfortable in the company of a close friend, might surprise themselves at a party by regaling stories and dancing the night away. However, acting out-of-character for any length of time can be exhausting and rarely happens in real life in the absence of a major personality change, so while we’ll fully believe your fictional character’s counter-dispositional behaviour for a scene or two if it makes sense given your character’s social or emotional context, it won’t be believable without sufficient justification if sustained for too long (events that might realistically cause a longer-term personality change include brain injury, psychological trauma or a major life event, such as a radical career change).

Some of the most interesting out-of-character behaviour happens when we’re in danger. For a fictional example, take the world-class hacker-turned-investigator Lisbeth Salander from Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series (2005-19) and its film adaptation The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009/2011). In her most authentic state, Salander is characterised as being introverted and submissive but, when physically threatened, she becomes not only extraordinarily aggressive but also sadistic. Essential to making this behaviour believable is that it makes sense given the contexts and her traumatic backstory as a rape survivor. Equally important is that Salander consistently acts in this way every time she faces a potential male aggressor. We understand her actions as part of her behavioural repertoire. There is realistic consistency in the way that her traits interact with her situation.

The most engaging characters draw on these most fascinating elements of our human nature and continue to reveal truths that we rarely contemplate. They give us deeper insights about ourselves and the huge variety of ways that we might behave in situations that we’ve never had to encounter. We read, watch and engage with characters not only to be moved and entertained, but to also learn. How might we react in that situation? What would we do? What insights can we take away from studying that kind of character more closely that could be useful to us if we were to encounter someone similar in our own lives? How might that situation feel? How would we cope? Whom should we trust? The most entrancing characters lead us away from our own experiences and offer others so tangible that we willingly suspend our own realities to enter into their writers’ fantasies. And that reminds me, there’s a show that I really need to get back to, and characters of my own that I need to write.

Links & books

Audit your character on the Big Five dimensions using this free personality test .

Weigh up your character’s virtues and vices on the light and dark triads of personality. While most people tip more towards the light, the more believable characters will have an even mix of good and bad qualities.

Read more about the Edinburgh International Book Festival/Durham University research into how published authors experience their characters as having independent agency, then try some of the character-development exercises used in this study.

Create more believable character transformations by listening to this podcast with the psychologist Wiebke Bleidorn about how our personalities change over time.

Discover more psychological tools to help your character development in my book The Science of Writing Characters: Using Psychology to Create Compelling Fictional Characters (2020). It includes chapters on creating characters using the Big Five dimensions, how personality influences dialogue, creating secondary characters with dynamic relationships, character transformation, motivations and emotions.

Learn more about the neuroscience behind writing characters and developing plotlines in Paul Joseph Gulino and Connie Shears’s fascinating book The Science of Screenwriting: The Neuroscience Behind Storytelling Strategies (2018).

If your interests are more aligned with psychoanalytic approaches to character development, then read William Indick’s insightful book Psychology for Screenwriters (2004), which is equally applicable to novelists.

Look out for the book Be Who You Want: Unlocking the Science of Personality Change (May 2021) by the Psyche editor Christian Jarrett for further revelations about how your characters can transform.

How to use ‘possibility thinking’

Have you hit an impasse in your personal or professional life? Answer these questions to open your mind to what’s possible

by Constance de Saint Laurent & Vlad Glăveanu

The nature of reality

How to think about time

This philosopher’s introduction to the nature of time could radically alter how you see your past and imagine your future

by Graeme A Forbes

Cognitive and behavioural therapies

How to stop living on auto-pilot

Are you going through the motions? Use these therapy techniques to set meaningful goals and build a ‘life worth living’

by Kiki Fehling

Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.

To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to  upgrade your browser .

Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link.

• We're Hiring!
• Help Center

The role of fictional characters in psychological exploration, personal experiences, emotional responses

2019, Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience

Reading fictional literature can be a way of learning about the world and the human condition-a claim explicated by Schick (1982) and empirically confirmed by Marsh, Butler, and Umanath (2012). An aspect of this is the use of fiction for educational purposes. In this study, we navigate through the eyes of the writer as the narrative tool, allowing us to enter into a new dimension, particularly in the story of "In Time and with Water." Evaluating predicament and causes in a given plot while identifying the struggles of emotional disorder through the lens of a character saw benefits for theoretical understanding and self-awareness. Using fictional characters strategically benefits the increase of learning environment, stimulating in education setting. Our favorite fictional characters from books and movies often display an impressive and wide range of psychological attributes, both positive and negative. We admire their resilience, courage, humanity, or justice, and we are intrigued by other characters who show signs of personality disorders and mental illnesspsychopathy, narcissism, antisocial personality, paranoia, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia, among many other conditions. The aim of this commentary is to explore the usage of literature in stories and films, fictional characters in understanding psychological attributes as well as personal human experiences. Other motivations of these characters that include examples of both accurate and misleading depictions of psychological traits and conditions, enabling readers to distinguish realistic from inaccurate depictions of human behavior.

Related Papers

Japanese Psychological Research

Elly A Konijn

Transstellar Journals

TJPRC Publication

Therapeutic Literary Novels: A Step Back from Mental Agony Psychological fiction offers a unique kind of therapy to its readers. Proposed paper intends to reflect upon few exemplary characters from English literature around the world. This particular genre of writing tries to delve into circumstances that force characters to behave in an abnormal manner. Internal observation is stressed upon in order to understand the character; motivation behind actions is more important than the actions of psychological characters. Society, at large, talks about taking care of sick. In reality, mentally disturbed people are considered to be outcasts. Enough time is not given by family and friends to get normalcy back into the life of such people. Literature is valued for bringing out all that troubles man in a lighter tone through stream of consciousness writing style, interior dialogues and monologues and other literary devices. Troubled youth of present age easily identifies with these characters. Catharsis helps to cleanse minds of troubled readers. When a reader identifies himself with certain traits found in characters from these stories, it gives him a sense of being part of their world; his sense of alienation is replaced by feelings that make him want to reach out to the character to console and to be consoled. Reader finds a purpose to his meaningless existence. Readers having to deal with the sick in their lives also learn to live a better life through all that touches upon the lives of characters, who have a mental case amidst them.

International Journal of Educational Methodology

Fictional characters give literary works a sense of reality. The actions of fictional characters play a crucial role in children&#39;s personality development. Young readers who lack critical reading skills are more likely to incorporate fictional characters into their lives because they have a hard time telling reality from fiction. Therefore, we should determine how children perceive fictional characters and teach them that they are imaginary figures. In this way, we can help them approach those characters&#39; actions from an external and critical perspective. This study adopted a qualitative research design (case study) to investigate secondary school students&#39; perceptions of fictional characters. The sample consisted of 45 secondary school students (28 female and 17 male). Data were collected through interviews and document review techniques. Data were analyzed using content analysis. Results showed that participants were more likely to be interested in and identify with ch...

Anne Gre Wabeke

New Literary History

Paisley Livingston

Cynthia Vinney , Karen E . Dill-Shackleford , Kristin Hopper-Losenicky

This essay provides an overview of research and theory on narrative and its important, functional role in human experience, including the ways people use media to interrogate their own beliefs and feelings, and derive social meaning. Thought‐provoking film, television, and books can help us make meaning of our lives and grow in ways that are important for our successful social functioning. Research reviewed here demonstrates that exposure to fiction can increase empathy and social skills and reduce prejudice. Our connection to characters and stories has been studied in various ways as extensions of the self into another, while at the same time bringing the other into the self. Bringing together disparate perspectives, we propose that connecting to story worlds involves a process of " dual empathy " —simultaneously engaging in intense personal processing while also " feeling through " characters, both of which produce benefits. Because the value of entertainment narratives may not always be well understood, we explain how those experiences can be personal, social, and can serve important adaptive functions.

NATALIA IRRAZABAL

Youth Voice Journal

Toula Gordillo

Carl Jung’s (1947) ‘collective unconscious’ and Joseph Campbell’s (1963) ‘mythographic discoveries’ examined the role of myth in our everyday lives. Additionally, Dr. Viktor Frankl (1984) identified that the ability to make meaning out of suffering can assist a person, including young adults, with mental health concerns. In this discussion paper it is argued that myth-based fantasy stories that describe the legendary ‘hero’s quest’ can play an important role in helping a young person to comprehend mental health suffering. Through the literary trope of Young Adult (YA) fantasy fiction, mythical fantasy stories can aid in understanding during a process of inner reflection and cognitive reframing. As part of an emerging methodology entitled Story Image Therapy (SIT)®, narratives such as the katabatic tale of the hero’s sojourn journey (to the ‘underworld’ and return) provide a viable method for a young person to make meaning out of mental health distress. The proposed method can also be used to deliver mental health information and strategies in a way that is fun, ever-expanding and open to individual, cultural and other interpretations. Evidence to support the YA fiction method includes archetypal literary criticism and bibliotherapy models, as well as the youth’s ‘literary voices’ revealed through the popular mythical YA fantasy fictions: Tolkien’s (1954-1955) The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Lewis’ (1950-1956) Narnia Chronicles, Rowling’s Harry Potter series (1997-2007) and Pullman’s (1995-2000) His Dark Materials trilogy.

Tom Cochrane

I defend the claim that fictional narratives provide cognitive benefits to readers in virtue of helping them to understand character. Fictions allow readers to rehearse the skill of selecting and organizing into narratives those episodes of a life that reflect traits or values. Two further benefits follow; i) fictional narratives provide character models that we can apply to real-life individuals (including ourselves) and ii) fictional narratives help readers to reflect on the value priorities that constitute character. I defend the plausibility of these cognitive benefits against certain worries raised by Gregory Currie and Peter Goldie.

Jean-François Vernay

A review of Mariano Longo's Emotions through literature Fictional narratives society and the emotional self

RELATED PAPERS

Rodolfo Anibal Coria

Maya Ramagopal

Niraldo Paulino

Zdeslav Hrepic

ARON PANGIHUTAN PARDEDE

Aron Pardede

Jurnal Kelautan dan Perikanan Terapan (JKPT)

helman yusuf

Bunga Oktaviani

TATuP - Zeitschrift für Technikfolgenabschätzung in Theorie und Praxis

peter wiedemann

Agricultura em Foco: Tópicos Em Manejo, Fertilidade do Solo e Impactos Ambientais - Volume 2

Maria José Mota Ramos

POLIBOTANICA

Eduardo Sahagun

Physica B: Condensed Matter

Journal of Sports and Motor Development and Learning

Journal of Sports and Motor Development and Learning , Farshid Tahmasbi

Agata Czyżowska

SAE Technical Paper Series

International journal of methods in psychiatric research

Erika Parlato

Clinical Cancer Research

Glenwood Goss

Natalie Boehler

Jurnal Bina Praja: Journal of Home Affairs Governance

Herie Saksono

Muhammadinah Muhammadinah

IEEE Control Systems

Jerry Hamann

Eduser - Revista de Educação

Cesario Barbante

Journal of Occupational Health Psychology

Joeri Hofmans

See More Documents Like This

RELATED TOPICS

•   We're Hiring!
•   Help Center
• Find new research papers in:
• Health Sciences
• Earth Sciences
• Cognitive Science
• Mathematics
• Computer Science
• Academia ©2024

• Search Menu
• Supplements
• Advance articles
• Author Guidelines
• Submission Site
• Open Access
• Why Submit?
• About Digital Scholarship in the Humanities
• About the European Association for Digital Humanities
• About the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations
• Editorial Board
• Advertising and Corporate Services
• Journals Career Network
• Self-Archiving Policy
• Dispatch Dates
• Journals on Oxford Academic
• Books on Oxford Academic

Article Contents

• 1 Introduction
• 2 The methods of research
• 3 The results of research
• 4 Conclusion
• Confict of interest
• < Previous

Research on the psychology of fictional characters based on artificial intelligence — an example study on The Family

• Article contents
• Figures & tables
• Supplementary Data

Ying Yuan, Research on the psychology of fictional characters based on artificial intelligence — an example study on The Family , Digital Scholarship in the Humanities , Volume 38, Issue 2, June 2023, Pages 798–806, https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqac058

• Permissions Icon Permissions

Using ecological recognition based on artificial intelligence technology and Chinese psychology analysis system, by comparing the characters’ dialogs in The Family , we got the main characters’ big-five personality scores. In order to confirm the validity of this method, we compared the predicted scores with documents related to characters’ psychological analysis and novel descriptions. The prediction results are supported by the literature and plot. This indicates that the analysis of characters’ personalities by literary intelligence is effective. This research method provides data support for literary critics and quantitatively reflects the personality differences of characters in novels.

Email alerts

Citing articles via.

• Recommend to Your Librarian

Affiliations

• Online ISSN 2055-768X
• Print ISSN 2055-7671
• Copyright © 2024 EADH: The European Association for Digital Humanities
• About Oxford Academic
• Publish journals with us
• University press partners
• What we publish
• New features  
• Open access
• Institutional account management
• Rights and permissions
• Get help with access
• Accessibility
• Advertising
• Media enquiries
• Oxford University Press
• Oxford Languages
• University of Oxford

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide

• Copyright © 2024 Oxford University Press
• Cookie settings
• Cookie policy
• Privacy policy
• Legal notice

This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

Unconscious

Use of a fictional character as part of therapy, how the subconscious can be prompted to create therapeutic metaphors..

Posted December 4, 2022 | Reviewed by Lybi Ma

• What Is the Unconscious
• Find counselling near me
• Exploration of our subconscious can help improve our psychological health.
• A patient's creativity can be engaged by suggesting that they imagine a fictional character.
• Psychological conflict can be resolved through work with metaphors.

As part of therapy , to facilitate better self-understanding, I teach patients how to access their subconscious . Improved self-understanding helps empower patients including through allowing them to choose therapeutic avenues and define their own solutions to their psychological issues. The subconscious can be accessed in different ways including through muscle strength testing, talking, typing, and imagining talking with an inner advisor.

A patient’s creativity can be engaged in the process of accessing subconscious material, by suggesting that they imagine a fictional character while doing hypnosis and inviting the patient to imagine an adventure with the character.

This method allows the subconscious to present therapeutic metaphors as part of the resultant experience. This process may be analogous to the subconscious use of metaphors during dreaming .

Exploration of our subconscious metaphors can help improve our psychological health, whether we become aware of these metaphors in dreams , through accessing our subconscious in hypnosis , or through other means, such as when we note the metaphors we use to describe day-to-day events.

For example, in describing a hurricane we might talk about it as a monster storm, or when we describe a humiliating experience, we might state that we were treated as if we were tiny as an ant.

A discussion about the meaning of a metaphor can allow us to resolve psychological conflict. For example, a monster storm metaphor may be alluding to irrational fears we may have had in childhood . By identifying these fears we can then address them, including thinking of adult ways of preparing for a major storm.

A Fictional Character Approach to Generating Therapeutic Metaphors

An example of the fictional character approach involved Paul, an 18-year-old patient with anxiety and asthma related to his severe allergy to milk products.

As I was seeing him in my role as his pulmonologist at the time we worked together, sometimes I had occasion to perform his physical examinations. During a couple of those times, Paul pointed out that his right ear was surgically reconstructed because of a birth defect. The surgery occurred when he was 14 years old. He told me that he disliked when people questioned him about it.

I suggested the idea of picking a fictional character to Paul, as a way of allowing his subconscious to give him some helpful ideas. He happily chose to imagine Captain Hook. I asked why Paul would want to interact with a very unpleasant fellow such as Hook, and Paul replied that he did not mind.

Paul had already learned to use hypnosis to calm himself by imagining going to his safe place, which was in a boat on a lake. Therefore, from his “lake” in his hypnotic state, I asked Paul to visualize a curtain.

I suggested that Paul go through the curtain and find himself on an island. At my request, he described what he saw on the island. He then stated that he could see a young boy dressed in green coming towards him. I asked Paul to describe this boy in more detail. He said that the boy was Peter Pan. He described his green felt cap with a feather in it, down to his green shoes, and the small number of freckles on his face.

Paul stated that he was 13 years old just like Peter Pan. Paul said that Peter Pan wanted to teach him to jump into the air 10 feet at a time. Paul tried that and said it was fun. Then, Paul said that Peter taught him how to float.

Paul stated, “I’m floating, I’m floating, I’m floating,” very enthusiastically. He then said dejectedly, “Oh, I came down, I lost my concentration .”

I suggested to Paul that he could do it again.

A few moments later Paul reported, “I’m floating, I’m floating, this is so much fun, this is so cool.”

I suggested that Paul come down.

“I don’t want to. This is too much fun,” he retorted.

I remained silent for a few moments, and finally, he said, “Okay, I’m down.”

I suggested Paul and Peter sit on a rock, and then asked Paul again if he still wants to meet Captain Hook.

I said, “Okay, please go around the mountain in front of you, and there you will be able to find Captain Hook’s ship.

Paul described Captain Hook as coming towards him and Peter in a rowboat. He said, “Captain Hook says that we need to get off the island.”

“How will you respond?” I asked.

“We told him, ‘No.’”

Paul reported that Captain Hook said, “If you were adults, I would kill you.”

Paul said he asked Captain Hook why he was so mean.

Paul said that Captain Hook replied, “I am not so mean, this is my natural de mean or.” (Paul stressed the middle syllable of “demeanor” as he related the events.)

Paul said, “Why is your natural de mean or so mean?”

“Because when I was growing up my friends picked on me because of my hook, just like they must pick on you because of your ear.”

Paul said, “People who picked on me because of my ear were not my friends. I found new friends. I am bigger than people who pick on me.”

“That’s my problem, I never found any other friends.”

“Well, Peter and I could be your friends,” suggested Paul.

“That would make me very happy. Thank you for being my friends.”

Then, Paul reported that Hook turned into a young boy and that Peter, Paul, and Hook all played together in the woods.

In this session with Captain Hook, Paul apparently was able to express and perhaps resolve some of his misgivings relating to his ear defect and or its reconstruction. His choice to imagine Captain Hook as the fictional character in this experience likely was not coincidental, as Captain Hook also had a physical abnormality.

In Paul’s imagined interaction, Captain Hook explained how his hook was a metaphor for Paul’s ear and used that metaphor to suggest how Paul might have felt about some of his social interactions during childhood. The resolution of Captain Hook’s problem when Paul offered to befriend him may have been Paul’s way of demonstrating to himself that he accepts himself as he is.

Further therapy following the session with Paul could have involved discussions about why he had imagined being five years younger, the significance of the floating experience, and why Captain Hook turned into a young boy.

In contrast to how Paul appeared to use metaphors to resolve his own issues during the experience with a fictional character, often metaphors presented by the subconscious are not easily interpretable and require a lot of discussion during therapy.

Copyright Ran D. Anbar

More stories about Paul and his use of hypnosis to help himself are available in the 2021 book "Changing Children’s Lives with Hypnosis: A Journey to the Center," by Ran D. Anbar. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Ran D. Anbar, M.D., FAAP, is board-certified in both pediatric pulmonology and general pediatrics. He is the author of the new book Changing Children’s Lives with Hypnosis: A Journey to the Center .

• Find Counselling
• Find a Support Group
• Find Online Therapy
• United Kingdom
• Asperger's
• Bipolar Disorder
• Chronic Pain
• Eating Disorders
• Passive Aggression
• Personality
• Goal Setting
• Positive Psychology
• Stopping Smoking
• Low Sexual Desire
• Relationships
• Child Development
• Therapy Center NEW
• Diagnosis Dictionary
• Types of Therapy

Understanding what emotional intelligence looks like and the steps needed to improve it could light a path to a more emotionally adept world.

• Coronavirus Disease 2019
• Affective Forecasting
• Neuroscience

Case Studies of Fictional Characters

Bipolar ii disorder.

Name: Casey Roberts

Source: Mad Love (Movie, 1995)

Background Information

Casey Roberts is a female high school student in her late teens. Upon arriving at a new high school, she appears to be fairly normal in behavior. However, it is apparent from early on that she has almost no social relationships, or even more, a desire to have any. Aside from a relationship with her parents, who appear supportive and loving, she only has one other relationship which consumes her throughout the movie: her relationship with her boyfriend Matt. This relationship is what drives many of her actions throughout the movie. Her parents say there is no past mental health history in their families. However, they are in denial of her having an actual mental illness and attribute it to her trying to get back at them for controlling her, so the real history may not be reported. No major drug or alcohol use is apparent although casual drinking is seen throughout the movie and nicotine use, especially while in her depressed episode, is also shown. There are no outward health problems visible in Casey. She is a very intelligent girl with a very strong willed personality. However, she does not seem to care too much about asserting that intelligence towards any goals. School is in no way important to her.

Description of the Problem

Although Casey is at some points able of living and functioning normally, she has a past of suicidal behavior. As stated in the Background Information, she has little to no social relationships. However, she does appear to be a fairly friendly person. Probably the largest hindrance on her functioning is her impulsivity. She seems to think that she should do and be able to do whatever she wants when she pleases. Towards the end she also has a tendency towards thoughts that are very sporadic in nature. Casey displays much risk taking behavior without seeing any important consequences that could occur from them. She is also temperamental and very easy to irritate. Delinquent behavior is also presented in her behaviors in the form of truancy and the case of her pulling a fire alarm in the school. She also has very strong thoughts of guilt and states that as punishment for the things she has done to Matt, he should leave her. When the onset of her illness begins to be very apparent, she shows much distractibility and tends to not behave correctly in social situations. Insomnia also is presented along with strange ideas. These ideas could possibly also be symptoms of Schizophrenia such as thinking people are always watching her and out to get her. She believes that she must put cut outs of eyes up around their apartment to protect them.

The diagnosis for Casey is Bipolar II Disorder (296.89). To reach that diagnosis the following must be true:

• Within the movie there is a Major Depressive Episode. Her parents also referred back to the fact that Casey had experienced episodes before as well.
• A Hypomanic Episode was also included in the movie. Evidence on whether or not she had been through more than one episode of this before was not provided.
• Casey’s symptoms were not severe enough to classify as a Manic or Mixed Episode.
• Although Casey had some odd behaviors that seemed almost similar to ones that would be presented in Schizophrenia or a very similar disorder, they would not be classified as actual delusions. The inconsistencies in her behaviors seem to classify more into Bipolar Disorder.
• Casey’s ability to form relationships was greatly affected by her symptoms. Also, distress was definitely seen within social situations. Casey was found in a bathroom with her dress off and hitting the walls and crying.

A diagnosis of a Major Depressive Episode was found by the following:

• Depressed mood most of the day, nearly every day, as indicated by either subjective report (e.g., feels sad or empty) or observation made by others (e.g., appears tearful). NOTE: In children and adolescents, can be irritable mood.
• Markedly diminished interest or pleasure in all, or almost all, activities most of the day, nearly every day (as indicated by either subjective account or observation made by others)
• Significant weight loss when not dieting or weight gain (e.g., a change of more than 5% of body weight in a month), or decrease or increase in appetite nearly every day. NOTE: In children, consider failure to make expected weight gains.
• Insomnia or hypersomnia nearly every day
• Psychomotor agitation or retardation nearly every day (observable by others, not merely subjective feelings of restlessness or being slowed down)
• Fatigue or loss of energy nearly every day
• Feelings of worthlessness or excessive or inappropriate guilt (which may be delusional) nearly every day (not merely self-reproach or guilt about being sick)
• Diminished ability to think or concentrate, or indecisiveness, nearly every day (either by subjective account or as observed by others)
• Casey presented symptoms a, d, g, and i.
• Her symptoms were not presented as both Manic and Depressive on a nearly daily basis.
• Distress and impairment were definitely apparent in social situations. The example of the bathroom scene previously mentioned demonstrated this.
• No drugs were being used besides nicotine and no other stated medical condition was present.
• No loved ones were lost; the symptoms had been reported for over 2 months and she had attempted suicide numerous times.

A diagnosis of a Hypomanic Episode was found according to the following:

• Casey’s mood was elevated while they were traveling and she was in her Hypomanic Episode. The severity of it would not classify as a Manic Episode however.
• inflated self-esteem or grandiosity
• decreased need for sleep (e.g., feels rested after only 3 hours of sleep)
• more talkative than usual or pressure to keep talking
• flight of ideas or subjective experience that thoughts are racing
• distractibility (i.e., attention too easily drawn to unimportant or irrelevant external stimuli)
• increase in goal-directed activity (either socially, at work or school, or sexually) or psychomotor agitation
• Casey presents symptoms b, c, e, and g within her Hypomanic Episode.
• She seemed to function almost normally when the episode was not happening. When she started presenting symptoms, her level of functioning obviously decreased.
• Like previously stated, her changes were observable.
• Her Hypomanic Episode did not strike Matt as “scary” or needing help immediately like her Depressive Episode. No hospitalization was seen as necessary.

Accuracy of Portrayal

Watching the portrayal of Casey would give a person a fairly good look into Bipolar Disorder. Most people label someone as “bipolar” when really they are just having mood swings or maybe suffering from Cyclothymic Disorder. This idea of such rapid switching is not accurate. Although Casey did have her moments of sudden anger or happiness, that can be accounted for by simply an experience she had or something that was said. Simple reactions like this are very common. However, her episodes as portrayed were seen as changing over periods of time, not just in an instant, giving the watchers a pretty good insight on the disorder. In the film, Casey’s mother stated that Casey suffered from depression. This may have influenced watchers to disregard her Hypomanic symptoms. Overall, the audience would get a fairly good look into the actual life of a person with Bipolar Disorder.

When Casey arrived for treatment, a medical work up would occur to make sure the disorder was accurately diagnosed. This would also allow knowledge of the current episode, suicidal thoughts, and hopefully more family history. Casey would probably then be prescribed lithium carbonate. Because of the potency of this drug, her dosage would need to be very closely monitored. Therapy would also be a very useful tool for Casey’s treatment. Cognitive behavioral therapy would be a good start to help her deal with her emotions and stress. Therapy would also help Casey to fully understand Bipolar Disorder and to know in the future when an episode may happen. Likewise, education would be essential for her parents. Helping them understand what exactly is happening with Casey and to recognize her episodes would be very beneficial.

• school Campus Bookshelves
• menu_book Bookshelves
• perm_media Learning Objects
• login Login
• how_to_reg Request Instructor Account
• hub Instructor Commons
• Download Page (PDF)
• Download Full Book (PDF)
• Periodic Table
• Physics Constants
• Scientific Calculator
• Reference & Cite
• Tools expand_more
• Readability

selected template will load here

This action is not available.

6.110: Narcissistic Personality Disorder

• Last updated
• Save as PDF
• Page ID 64890

Name: Jenna Maroney

Source: 30 Rock (Television series, mid 2000s)

Background Information

Jenna Marony is a forty-three year old woman, who was born Ystrepa Grokovitz on February 24, 1969. She grew up in Bakersfield, CA. Her father, was a burger server in suburban Santa Barbara. He dumped Jenna’s mother, a dental hygienist, for another woman. Jenna still says she will “always be his little girl.” After being spurned, Jenna’s mother made her sit on every mall Santa’s lap in Bakersfield in an attempt to find him. Jenna has a sister who urinated in one of Jenna’s eyes when she was little, which causes it to not open all the way. Another sister is deceased. She did not get along with her half-sister, Courtney, who is now deceased. Upon hearing of her sister’s demise, Jenna showed no obvious signs of sorrow or grief. Jenna also has a niece, who draws pictures of her Auntie Jenna. Jenna finds the pictures to be offensive, when in fact they are just childlike renderings of Jenna.

During Jenna’s teen years, her mother moved what family she had left from California to Florida. Jenna attended high school on a boat, which has subsequently sunk. At the age of 16, Jenna was engaged to a congressman. She has also reportedly dated O.J. Simpson, a music producer, a sniper, a mob boss, and hinted at having been in a three-way relationship with Rosanne and Tom Arnold. Jenna’s started singing at a young age, as a distraction for her mom, who was busy shoplifting. Jenna went on to study voice at Northwestern University and also at the Royal Tampa Academy of Dramatic Tricks, where she majored in playing prom queens and murdered runaways. She has been in various films and commercial, and is currently employed as an actress on a television series.

There is no history of substance use, however, there is a history of binge eating, but the episode was brief, and Jenna’s eating habits have since returned to normal. Jenna is in good health, with no reported concerns.

Jenna seems to have coped with her life difficulties by becoming the “center of attention,” and the center of her own universe. Abandoned by her father and used by her mother as a decoy, Jenna possibly feels unloved and rejected. Jenna’s inability to empathize with others and sustain lasting relationships with are major weaknesses. She is constantly battling with someone, whether it be a co-worker, a friend or a family member. Currently, Jenna is involved with a transvestite who dresses as Jenna. In fact, Jenna met her lover while participating in a Jenna Maroney Look-Alike Contest, in which Jenna herself only placed fourth. Her new lover won the contest, and they have been intimate since that time.

Description of the Problem

Jenna does not feel she has any problems, other than not receiving the attention and recognition she feels she deserves. Her achievements are not commensurate with her desire to be “worshipped,” and adored. Jenna feels she is entitled to special treatment and when this fails to occur within her career or social life, she becomes explosive and stubborn. She has an excessive need for admiration, as evidenced by her choice of careers. She seems to have no empathy regarding others, and on the rare occasions empathy is displayed by Jenna, it is not genuine empathy, but a means to an end. In other words, she fakes empathy to manipulate others, or for personal gain. Jenna repeatedly poisoned a co-worker in the hopes of dating one of the “hot” EMT workers who came to the rescue. Jenna is severely jealous of her co-star in her current television series, and is constantly looking for ways to undermine him. She dreams of unparalleled success and believes she is the most beautiful, talented woman to grace this planet. While Jenna does not see this as a problem, the rest of society fails to agree with her assessment of herself, and this causes much frustration for Jenna. Jenna reacts very unfavorably to even the slightest criticism, as she believes herself to be perfect and unique. If she is criticized, she feels that the person doing the critique, “just doesn’t understand her,” because they are not as special and wonderful as she.

Jenna best fits the diagnostic category of Narcissistic Personality Disorder (301.81)

• has a grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements)
• is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love (perfect marriage to the perfect spouse)
• believes that he or she is “special” and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions)
• requires excessive admiration
• has a sense of entitlement, i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations (“You owe me because I’m that good”)
• is inter-personally exploitative, i.e., takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends
• lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others
• is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her
• shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes
• history of intense but short-term relationships with others; inability to make or sustain genuinely intimate relationships
• a tendency to be attracted to leadership or high-profile positions or occupations
• a pattern of alternating between unrealistic idealization of others and equally unrealistic devaluation of them
• assessment of others in terms of usefulness
• a need to be the center of attention or admiration in a working group or social situation
• hypersensitivity to criticism, however mild, or rejection from others
• an unstable view of the self that fluctuates between extremes of self-praise and self-contempt
• preoccupation with outward appearance, “image,” or public opinion rather than inner reality
• painful emotions based on shame (dislike of who one is) rather than guilt (regret for what one has done)

Jenna qualifies for almost every single diagnostic criteria, as outlined in the Description of the Problem and her Background information. There is some overlap with Histrionic Personality Disorder, as Jenna does frequently use her sexuality to gain her desires, however, she fits more of the Narcissistic criteria than the HPD criterion.

Accuracy of Portrayal

The portrayal of narcissism in this character is fairly accurate, although there is some overlap with Histrionic Personality Disorder. One of the deciding factors whether this was NPD or HPD was the fact that Jenna falls in love with a man who dresses as her. Narcissus was also in love with himself and was forever doomed to gaze upon his reflection in a pool of water, until he died. It is said as his boat crossed over into the afterlife, he leaned over to catch on last glimpse of himself in the water. This is the epitome of Jenna. While more males than females are diagnosed with NPD, (7% for males and 4 % for females), Jenna is a prime example of a female narcissist.

Narcissists rarely seek treatment, as their perception is that they are “better” than everyone else. If a narcissist does enter treatment, psychotherapy is the recommended course of treatment, and perhaps some group therapy. If group therapy is utilized, clear boundaries should be set as to respecting other people in the group. Prognosis poor.

A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: http://pb.libretexts.org/apsy/?p=154