"Fact versus Fiction – How paratextual information shapes our reading processes"

Our life is full of stories: some of them depict real-life events and were reported, e.g. in the daily news or in autobiographies, whereas other stories, as often presented to us in movies and novels, are fictional. However, we have only little insights in the neurocognitive processes underlying the reading of factual as compared to fictional contents. We investigated the neurocognitive effects of reading short narratives, labeled to be either factual or fictional. Reading in a factual mode engaged an activation pattern suggesting an action-based reconstruction of the events depicted in a story. This process seems to be past-oriented and leads to shorter reaction times at the behavioral level. In contrast, the brain activation patterns corresponding to reading fiction seem to reflect a constructive simulation of what might have happened. This is in line with studies on imagination of possible past or future events.

Identity, Philosophy, and the Problem of Armenian History in the Sixth Century

History and Identity in the Late Antique Near East gathers together the work of distinguished historians and early career scholars with a broad range of expertise to investigate the significance of newly emerged, or recently resurrected, ethnic identities on the borders of the eastern Mediterranean world. It focuses on the "long late antiquity" from the eve of the Arab conquest of the Roman East to the formation of the Abbasid caliphate. The first half of the book offers papers on the Christian Orient on the cusp of the Islamic invasions. These papers discuss how Christians negotiated the end of Roman power, whether in the selective use of the patristic past to create confessional divisions or the emphasis of the shared philosophical legacy of the Greco-Roman world. The second half of the book considers Muslim attempts to negotiate the pasts of the conquered lands of the Near East, where the Christian histories of Hira or Egypt were used to create distinctive regional identities for Arab settlers. Like the first half, this section investigates the redeployment of a shared history, this time the historical imagination of the Qu'ran and the era of the first caliphs. All the papers in the volume bring together studies of the invention of the past across traditional divides between disciplines, placing the re-assessment of the past as a central feature of the long late antiquity. As a whole, History and Identity in the Late Antique Near East represents a distinctive contribution to recent writing on late antiquity, due to its cultural breadth, its interdisciplinary focus, and its novel definition of late antiquity itself.

Using virtual reality to teach special populations how to cope in crisis: the case of a virtual earthquake

The unique characteristics of special populations such as pre-school children and Down syndrome kids in crisis and their distorted self-image were never studied before, because of the difficulty of crisis reproduction. This study proposes a VR setting that tries to model some special population's behaviour in the time of crises and offers them a training scenario. The sample population consisted of 30 pre-school children and 20 children with Down syndrome. The VR setting involved a high-speed PC, a VPL EyePhone 1, a MR toolkit, a vibrations plate, a motion capture system and other sensors. The system measured and modelled the typical behaviour of these special populations in a Virtual Earthquake scenario with sight and sound and calculated a VR anthropomorphic model that reproduced their behaviour and emotional state. Afterwards one group received an emotionally enhanced VR self-image as feedback for their training, one group received a plain VR self-image and another group received verbal instructions. The findings strongly suggest that the training was a lot more biased by the emotionally enhanced VR self-image than the other approaches. These findings could highlight the special role of the self-image to therapy and training and the interesting role of imagination to emotions, motives and learning. Further studies could be done with various scenarios in order to measure the best-biased behaviour and establish the most natural and affective VR model. This presentation is going to highlight the main findings and some theories behind them.

The "Image" of the Pharaoh in Judahite and Israelite Society According to the Glyptic Evidence

Among the many thousand scarabs, scaraboids and other stamp-seal amulets unearthed in Iron Age contexts in Cis- and Transjordan, there are many such seals showing royal Egyptian imagery on their bases. Focusing mainly on Pharaonic motifs, the paper aims to catalogue the principal iconemes, to trace their development throughout the Iron Ages and to extrapolate their significance vis-à-vis the contemporary glyptic assemblages. As will be shown, the royal imagery of the Egyptian king underwent considerable changes during pre-monarchic and monarchic times in Israel/Judah. This allows – to some extent – deducing the perception of the ‘image’ of the Egyptian king in this part of the Southern Levant at the close of the second and during the first centuries of the first millennium BCE. While the local seal production not only vividly copied earlier and contemporary Egyptian prototypes, it also developed idiosyncratic ‘Pharaonic’ motifs that were produced for the local market. On the other hand, imported Egyptian glyptic goods – such as scarabs and other amulet types – reveal further facets of the consumer behavior. They, too, shed light upon the ideological and religious preferences of the local population and illuminate the development of the vernacular attitude towards the Pharaonic symbols of power – including their obvious political and sacred connotations.

Factors of Home Dream Recall and Nightmare Frequency in a Non-Student Sample

Home dream recall frequencies and nightmare frequencies show great inter-individual differences. Most of the studies trying to explain these differences, however, studied young participants, so these findings might not be true for persons older than 25 years. The present study investigated the relationship between dream recall, nightmare frequency, age, gender, sleep parameters, stress, and subjective health in a community-based sample (N = 455) with a mean age of about 55 years. Some of the factors that have been shown to be associated with dream recall and nightmare frequency were also associated with these variables in non-student sample like frequency of nocturnal awakenings, current stress, and tiredness during the day. We were not able to replicate the effect of sex-role orientation on dream recall and nightmare frequency, supporting the idea that age might mediate the effect of daytime variables on dream recall and nightmare frequency. As nightmare frequency was related to sleep quality, stress, health problems, and tiredness during the day, it would be desirable that clinicians include a question about nightmares in their anamneses.

Klartraumtraining bei deutschen und japanischen Athleten: Eine Fragebogenstudie

Einleitung Eine eher unbekannte Art des Mentalen Trainings ist das Training im Klartraum (Erla-cher, Stumbrys & Schredl, 2011-12). Im Klartraum ist sich der Träumende bewusst, dass er träumt, und kann dadurch den fortlaufenden Trauminhalt kontrollieren. Frühere Stu-dien zeigten, dass es möglich ist, motorische Aufgaben im Klartraum zu üben, um dadurch eine verbesserte Leistung im Wachzustand zu erreichen (Erlacher & Schredl, 2010). Jedoch ist wenig über die Prävalenz von Klarträumern im Sport bekannt. Methode Die Stichprobe umfasste 840 deutsche (D: 483 m, 357 w) und 1323 japanische (J: 1000 m, 323 w) Athleten. Das Durchschnittsalter betrug 20,4 Jahre (D: 21,6 J: 19,7). Die Teil-nehmer wurden in verschiedenen Sportarten – von Mannschaftssportarten (z.B. Basket-ball) bis Einzelsportarten (z.B. Leichtathletik) – rekrutiert und füllten einen Fragebogen zum Thema Sport, Schlaf und Traum aus. Die Athleten waren durchschnittlich 9,1 Jahre (D: 11.1, J: 7,9) aktiv und trainierten etwa 14,4 Stunden (D: 11.1, J: 16,7) pro Woche. Der Fragebogen erfasste auf einer 8-stufigen Skala die Klartraumhäufigkeit (Plus Definition: Für ein klares Verständnis von Klarträumen); die Anwendung (z.B. Training) für den Sport und, wenn dies bestätigt wurde, ob sportliche Verbesserungen erlebten wurden. Ergebnisse 47% (D: 57%, J: 41%) der Athleten gaben an, mindesten einen Klartraum erlebt zu ha-ben, 20% (D: 24% J: 18%) sind häufige Klarträumer (mit einem oder mehrere Klarträume pro Monat) und 9% (D 9% , J: 9%) nutzen Klarträume für ihren Sport, davon berichtet die Mehrheit, dass das Klartraumtraining die sportliche Leistung im Wachzustand verbessert. Diskussion Etwa die Hälfte der Athleten kennt das Klarträumen aus eigener Erfahrung, ein Fünftel sind häufige Klarträumer und etwa jeder zehnte Athlet nutzt Klarträume für seinen Sport. Für die deutsche Stichprobe ist die Prävalenzrate der Athleten ähnlich wie in der Bevöl-kerung. Für die japanische Stichprobe liegen keine repräsentativen Bevölkerungsdaten vor, auf der Grundlage der hier vorgestellten Fragebogendaten scheint es jedoch, dass kulturellen Unterschiede eine untergeordnete Rolle spielen. Literatur Erlacher, D. & Schredl, M. (2010). Practicing a motor task in a lucid dream enhances subsequent perfor-mance: A pilot study. The Sport Psychologist, 24(2), 157-167. Erlacher, D., Stumbrys, T. & Schredl, M. (2011-2012). Frequency of lucid dreams and lucid dream practice in German athletes. Imagination, Cognition and Personality, 31(3), 237-246.

Melodrama and Narrative Fiction: Towards a Typology

Recent research on melodrama has stressed its versatility and ubiquity by approaching it as a mode of expression rather than a theatrical genre. A variety of contexts in which melodrama is at work have been explored, but only little scholarly attention has been paid to the relationship between melodrama and novels, short stories and novellas. This article proposes a typology of melodrama in narrative prose fiction, examining four different categories: Melodrama and Sentimentalism, Depiction of Melodramatic Performances in Narrative Prose Fiction, Theatrical Antics and Aesthetics in Narrative Prose Fiction and Meta-Melodrama. Its aim is to clarify the ways in which melodrama, ever since its early days on the stages of late eighteenth-century Europe, has interacted with fictional prose narratives, thereby shaping the literary imagination in the Anglophone world.

"Two hundred ninety-four": Remediation and multimodal performance in tourist placemaking

We offer here a multimodal discourse analysis of a range of verbal (writing and speech), nonverbal (movement and gesture) and technological (photography and video) resources used by tourists at the Leaning Tower of Pisa. In doing so, we pin-point the recycling and layering of mediatized representations (e.g. guidebooks and official brochures), mediated actions (e.g. climbing the Tower or posing in front of it), and remediated practices (e.g. posting a YouTube video of oneself climbing the 294 steps to the top of the Tower). Through this kind of empirically-based examination of tourists’ discursive and embodied performances – their ways of talking about and behaving in spaces – we witness how people never simply visit places but are always actively shaping and making these places. The Leaning Tower of Pisa is, therefore, as much an emergent production of the tourist imagination as it is a pre-existing, lop-sided construction of stone.