peopleanalyst

research / vela / reports

Text-aesthetic literature review

Literature review for the text-aesthetic thread.

Vela·Reports·source: people-analyst/vela/docs/research/papers/text-aesthetic-literature-review.md

title: "Aesthetic Response to Text: Desire, Absorption, and the Measurement of Reading Experience" status: Draft v1 — awaiting reconciliation + editorial pass date: 2026-04-24 source: Produced from the Claude-branch text-aesthetic browser lane (ASN-594). Cross-validated against the ChatGPT Deep Research branch preserved at docs/research/text-aesthetic-literature-map.md merged source. Reconciled literature review to follow as a future assignment parallel to ASN-596.

Aesthetic Response to Text: Desire, Absorption, and the Measurement of Reading Experience

A Literature Review for the Vela Research Program

Cross-validated from two independent parallel drafts · 24 April 2026

Abstract This literature review synthesises the empirical and theoretical foundations underlying a text-aesthetic research programme parallel to the Vela visual-aesthetic platform. The central question is both narrow and consequential: which findings from visual aesthetics transfer to text, and where do the modalities diverge in ways that require text-specific measurement infrastructure? Drawing on empirical aesthetics, cognitive neuroscience, narrative psychology, sexology, and romance-reading research, the review maps each major construct — from the AESTHEMOS scale and the transportation-imagery model to the dual-control model of sexual arousal and the cross-modal neural evidence — onto its empirical support in the text domain. The review documents three partially supported transfer findings (processing fluency, peak affect and chills, default-mode network engagement), three areas of documented cross-modal divergence (foregrounding and disfluency, category-specificity of arousal, the absence of a validated romance-reader-specific instrument), and five falsifiable gap questions that a text-aesthetic platform would be positioned to address. Special attention is given to the contested replication status of the literary-fiction–theory-of-mind claim, which represents the most high-profile empirical claim in the field and the one most in need of accurate characterisation before a text-aesthetic instrument is designed around it.

  1. Introduction The empirical study of aesthetic response to text is substantially less developed than its visual and musical counterparts. Decades of research in visual neuroaesthetics have produced validated measurement instruments, replicable neural correlates, and well-characterised individual-difference dimensions. The analogous programme for text — asking what makes a passage move its reader, what compositional features predict desire to continue, how absorption and arousal interact — remains fragmented across at least four partially disconnected literatures: empirical aesthetics and poetics, narrative transportation research, romance and erotica reading studies, and the psychophysiology of sexual arousal to erotic text. The Vela Research Programme has built a visual-aesthetic measurement apparatus around eight desire dimensions (softness, intensity, narrative, structure, texture, abstraction, classical, contemporary), a multi-signal response architecture capturing ratings, saves, dwell time, and aversion, and an adaptive curation engine modelled on computational psychometrics. The question this review addresses is whether the same architecture — or a structurally analogous one — is warranted for text, and what the literature says about each component. The review is based on two independently produced literature maps that were subsequently reconciled. Where the two maps disagreed on a source, the discrepancy is noted and the more cautious position is adopted. Where one map identified a source the other missed, the source is included with explicit provenance. DOI discrepancies are flagged rather than silently resolved.

  2. Aesthetic Emotions from Text as a Distinct Construct 2.1 The taxonomy of aesthetic emotions The most comprehensive framework for understanding aesthetic emotional response across modalities is Menninghaus et al.'s (2019) taxonomy. The taxonomy distinguishes at least nine families of aesthetic emotion — pleasure, awe, being moved, interest, vitality, fascination, tenderness, nostalgia, and the sublime — and argues that aesthetic emotions are characterised by their distance from pragmatic concerns, their positive valence despite apparently aversive content, and their motivational orientation toward continued engagement. This last property is directly analogous to what the Vela visual programme calls "desire," and its articulation across multiple art forms including poetry and literary prose makes it the foundational framework for a text-aesthetic instrument. The AESTHEMOS scale, developed by Schindler et al. (2017), operationalises this taxonomy in a validated multi-item self-report instrument covering all nine aesthetic emotion families. Validated across multiple studies and in English and German, AESTHEMOS is the most appropriate self-report anchor for a text-aesthetic programme. Critically, it was developed with attention to multiple art modalities including poetry, making it genuinely cross-modal rather than domain-specific. The "being moved" state — Rührung in German — has received dedicated empirical attention in Menninghaus et al. (2015), which established it as a psychologically distinct aesthetic state separable from sadness, pleasure, or general emotional intensity. Wassiliwizky et al.'s (2017) "Distancing-Embracing" model then addressed how negative emotions become aesthetically enjoyable, a finding directly relevant to literary content that evokes loss, grief, or longing. Both constructs are explicitly tested with text stimuli, providing a richer text-aesthetic foundation than the visual literature alone. 2.2 Poetic chills and peak affect The most directly relevant finding for a text-aesthetic platform — and the strongest positive transfer from the auditory/visual aesthetic literature — is the poetic chills literature. Wassiliwizky, Koelsch, Wagner, Jacobsen, and Menninghaus (2017) demonstrated in a psychophysiological and neuroimaging study that poetry reliably induces chills (piloerection, autonomic arousal, orbitofrontal and reward-circuit activation) at rates and magnitudes comparable to music-induced chills. This is a genuine cross-modal finding rather than a theoretical analogy: the same instruments used to study music chills (Blood & Zatorre, 2001) were applied to poetry, with convergent results. The finding establishes that text can function as a substrate for peak aesthetic affect, not merely as a vehicle for semantic information. What the chills literature also establishes, and what is equally important for instrument design, is that peak affect in response to text is not simply a function of emotional valence or arousal. The compositional features that predict chills in poetry — metric regularity disrupted at emotionally salient moments, imagery that activates sensorimotor systems, formal resolution after sustained tension — are more specific than the collative variables Berlyne identified for visual stimuli. This suggests that the eight visual desire dimensions will not map cleanly onto text, and that a text-aesthetic instrument may need to identify distinct compositional predictors. Johnson-Laird, Mancini, and Gangemi (2022) provided a complementary mechanistic account of how poetry evokes emotion, positing three partly independent routes: semantic simulation (mental models of events and situations), mimetic simulation (subvocalisation and prosodic embodiment), and felt evaluation (appraisal-like affect). This three-route model is the text-specific analogue of Chatterjee and Vartanian's (2014) perception-emotion-meaning triad for visual art, and it predicts that manipulating each route independently should produce dissociable aesthetic responses — a testable prediction for a text-aesthetic platform.

  3. Narrative, Imagery, and the Reading Experience 3.1 Transportation and absorption as text-specific constructs Narrative transportation — the experience of being pulled into a story world to the exclusion of the surrounding environment — has no close analogue in the visual aesthetic literature. Green and Brock (2000) established transportation as a measurable psychological state using a validated scale, and demonstrated that transportation predicts both emotional response and belief change in response to narrative. The construct is text- and film-specific: there is no validated visual-art equivalent of the Transportation Scale, because static visual art does not typically produce the "lost in the story" experience that defines transportation. Kuijpers, Hakemulder, Tan, and Doicaru (2014) developed the Story World Absorption (SWA) scale, or Reading Experience Inventory (REI), as a more reading-specific alternative, decomposing absorption into four subscales: narrative presence (being there), attentional focus (exclusion of the environment), emotional engagement (feeling with characters), and mental imagery vividness. A more recent validation by Kuijpers and colleagues (2024) using omnibus sampling provides updated psychometric properties. The SWA/REI is the most appropriate reading-specific absorption instrument currently available, and its four-subscale structure suggests that "absorption" is itself a multi-dimensional construct whose components may predict different reading outcomes. An important caveat is that transportation and absorption instruments measure a mode of reading that is intense and infrequent. Many aesthetic responses to text — the pleasure of a perfectly constructed sentence, the delayed appreciation of an image that resolves ambiguity — occur outside the transportation state. An instrument designed to capture the full range of text-aesthetic response will need to measure both immersive absorption and the more locally-operating aesthetic micro-responses that occur even when transportation is absent. 3.2 Fiction, social cognition, and theory of mind: the contested claim The most high-profile empirical claim in the recent literary aesthetics literature is Kidd and Castano's (2013) Science report that reading literary fiction improves theory of mind performance. The claim attracted enormous attention because it offered a cognitive mechanism for the value of literary reading that was both specific and empirically testable. Subsequent empirical work substantially weakened confidence in the original result. The replication record is now extensive. Panero et al. (2016) conducted two direct replication attempts with larger samples than the original and found no reliable effect of a single literary passage on theory-of-mind performance. Samur, Tops, and Koole (2018) reported four additional preregistered replication experiments with comparable null results. Van Kuijk, Verkoeijen, Dijkstra, and Zwaan (2018), in the most high-powered of the direct replications, found low evidential value and no reliable short-term causal effect in a direct replication of the Kidd and Castano design family. A meta-analysis by Dodell-Feder and Tamir (2018) of the broader fiction-reading and social cognition literature found a small positive average effect (d = 0.22) across the experimental literature, but this effect was heterogeneous and moderated by study design. The meta-analytic evidence supports a weak version of the claim — fiction reading is associated with better social cognition, and experimental interventions produce a small average improvement — but does not support the strong version that short-term literary fiction reading reliably and specifically improves theory of mind above popular fiction or nonfiction exposure. A text-aesthetic instrument should not be designed around this mechanism as if it were settled science. The more stable finding from the adjacent literature is Mar and Oatley's (2008) theoretical and empirical work on fiction as social simulation. Their argument — that narrative fiction functions as a simulation technology that allows readers to practise social reasoning in a low-stakes environment — is supported by correlational evidence and is consistent with the experimental meta-analytic result, even though the specific Kidd and Castano mechanism is not robustly established. 3.3 Literary foregrounding as a cross-modal discrepancy One of the most important cross-modal findings for instrument design is Miall and Kuiken's (1994) demonstration that literary foregrounding — the deliberate defamiliarisation of language through unusual syntax, unexpected metaphor, or rhythmic disruption — enhances aesthetic response to literary text. This finding directly contradicts the processing-fluency account that operates in visual aesthetics: where fluency (ease of processing) increases aesthetic pleasure for visual stimuli (Reber, Schwarz, & Winkielman, 2004), literary disfluency can increase aesthetic pleasure for text. This is not a contradiction to be explained away but a genuine cross-modal divergence. The visual system appears to respond positively to easy processing; the literary reading system appears, under some conditions, to respond positively to arrested, difficult processing that forces re-engagement with the text. Understanding when each pattern operates — and whether they can coexist within a single reading of the same passage — is one of the most important open questions for a text-aesthetic platform. Partial reconciliation may be available from Obermeier et al.'s (2016) ERP study of processing fluency in poetry appreciation. Using event-related potentials during poetry reading and liking judgments, they found that aesthetic appreciation of poetry did correlate with ease of processing at the neural level — but that this relationship was more complex than a simple fluency-preference link, with the N400 component (indexing semantic prediction) and the late positive potential (indexing emotional engagement) showing distinct patterns. This suggests that fluency effects in text aesthetics are real but operate at a more specific level than the global processing-ease account.

  4. Sexual Arousal to Text: The Sexology Line 4.1 Historical and conceptual foundations The empirical study of sexual arousal to text has a longer history than is commonly appreciated. Schmidt, Sigusch, and Schäfer (1973) published one of the earliest controlled studies demonstrating that erotic prose narratives reliably elicit self-reported and physiologically measured sexual arousal, with notable sex differences in both magnitude and pattern. This foundational finding established that text functions as a genuine stimulus class for sexual arousal — not merely as a symbolic representation of arousing content, but as a direct elicitor of physiological response — and that this response is meaningfully modulated by gender, providing the empirical anchor for subsequent research on sex-differentiated textual arousal preferences. The conceptual foundation for measuring individual differences in textual arousal is the dual-control model of Bancroft and Janssen, which proposes that sexual response is governed by the balance between two partially independent systems: a Sexual Excitation System (SES) that responds to sexual opportunities and cues, and a Sexual Inhibition System (SIS) that responds to threats, risks, and negative consequences. The SIS/SES model is particularly relevant for text-aesthetic design because text-based sexual stimuli differ from visual stimuli in ways that may differentially engage inhibitory systems: text requires active mental construction of the sexual scenario, allows slower pacing, and typically embeds arousal within narrative and relational context, all of which may reduce SIS activation relative to visual stimuli that present the scenario more directly. 4.2 Measurement infrastructure The SIS/SES instrument has been validated across multiple samples and languages. Janssen, Vorst, Finn, and Bancroft (2002) developed and validated the original scale in a male sample. Graham, Sanders, Milhausen, and McBride (2006) developed the women-specific extension with an initial validation sample of 655 women. Milhausen, Graham, Sanders, Yarber, and Maitland (2010) published the harmonised SESII-W/M form validated in samples of 766 women and 899 men. Subsequent validations include Velten et al.'s (2018) German sample and Neves, Nobre, and Pereira's (2016) Portuguese adaptation, establishing the instrument's cross-cultural portability. Chivers, Seto, Lalumière, Laan, and Grimbos (2010) conducted the most comprehensive meta-analysis of agreement between genital and subjective measures of sexual arousal across 132 studies, finding that the two measures diverge substantially — especially in women and especially in response to text stimuli. Text-elicited arousal shows lower genital-subjective concordance than visual stimuli, suggesting that for text, self-report measures may be capturing something different from genital response. This is a critical methodological consideration for any text-aesthetic arousal instrument: measuring subjective arousal is not equivalent to measuring physiological arousal, and the gap between them may be larger for text than for other stimulus modalities. Laan and Everaerd's (1995) psychophysiological work established that subjective and genital arousal in women are separable, and that subjective arousal is more strongly influenced by the emotional and relational context of the erotic stimulus — precisely the domain in which text differs from visual stimuli. This separability supports designing a text-aesthetic arousal instrument that measures subjective arousal as its primary outcome while treating physiological concordance as a validation target for a subsequent lab-based study. 4.3 Text-specific arousal: gender patterns and category specificity One of the most consequential cross-modal questions for instrument design concerns whether the gender differences in arousal category-specificity documented by Chivers, Rieger, Latty, and Bailey (2004) for visual stimuli hold for text. Chivers et al. found that men show highly category-specific genital arousal to visual sexual stimuli (strong response to preferred categories, weak response to non-preferred categories), while women show substantially less specificity (moderate genital response across a wide range of sexual categories regardless of self-reported preference). If this pattern replicates for text, a text-based desire profiling system would expect women's textual arousal responses to be less informative about category preference than men's. Scott and Cortez (2011) addressed the cross-sex comparability problem in text erotica research by designing erotic stories to minimise sex-targeting confounds — using matched narratives without cues designed specifically for one gender. With a sample of 212 participants, they found that such matched texts produced comparable subjective arousal in men and women, suggesting that much of the apparent gender difference in erotic text response may be attributable to content matching rather than fundamental differences in text responsiveness. This finding is important for a text-aesthetic platform: it suggests that genre conventions rather than gender-specific arousal architecture may drive apparent sex differences in textual arousal.

  5. Romance and Erotica Reading 5.1 Who reads and why Kraxenberger, Popescu, and Menninghaus (2021) conducted the most recent large-scale empirical study of erotic novel readers, documenting demographic and motivational profiles of the genre readership. Their findings confirm that erotic novel reading is predominantly female, motivation-driven (emotional and relational rather than primarily arousal-seeking), and associated with literary aesthetic engagement rather than purely functional sexual arousal. This profile is significant for instrument design because it suggests that a text-aesthetic platform designed for erotic and romance literature will need to measure the literary-aesthetic dimension of the reading experience alongside the arousal dimension — and that collapsing both into a single "desire" score would likely miss important individual differences. Radway's (1984) foundational qualitative study of romance readers, though not an experimental paradigm, remains the unavoidable cultural-studies anchor for understanding the social function of romance reading. Radway documented that her participants used romance reading as a space for emotional replenishment, fantasy, and the imaginative exploration of relational ideals — functions that are not captured by any existing psychometric instrument and that suggest the genre serves psychological needs that go well beyond the sexual arousal it may also produce. Salmon's (2012) evolutionary framing article, building on the earlier book-length treatment with Symons, argues that romance and pornography are sex-differentiated cultural products of evolved mating psychologies: romance fiction addresses female partner-selection psychology (emotional commitment, resource provisioning, relational security) while pornography addresses male sexuality (visual, categorical, context-free arousal). This framework predicts that text arousal in women should be more strongly moderated by narrative and relational context than arousal in men — a prediction consistent with both the Laan and Everaerd findings on subjective arousal and the Schmidt et al. gender differences. 5.2 Character identification and attachment Rain and Mar (2021) conducted the most directly relevant study on the relationship between reader attachment style and engagement with fictional characters. Using measures from attachment theory alongside validated character-engagement scales, they found that attachment orientation systematically predicts both how readers engage with characters and which character types they prefer. Anxiously attached readers showed stronger parasocial bonds with fictional characters overall, while avoidantly attached readers showed less engagement. This finding is directly relevant to a text desire-profiling system: individual differences in attachment style are likely to produce systematically different response patterns to romance and erotic texts, and attachment measures should be included in any personality profiling adjacent to text-aesthetic preference measurement. Liebers and Schramm (2017) extended parasocial relationship research explicitly to book characters, documenting that the factors predicting parasocial bonds with book characters differ from those predicting parasocial bonds with film and television characters. Character attributes matter more in books (because readers must actively construct mental representations), while medium-specific features (close-up shots, direct address) matter more in visual media. This finding suggests that a text-aesthetic platform would measure a genuinely different psychological phenomenon from a visual platform, not a simple parallel version of the same thing.

  6. Cross-Modal Aesthetic Response: What Transfers and What Does Not 6.1 Neural evidence: supramodal appraisal and the default mode network Brown, Gao, Tisdelle, Eickhoff, and Liotti's (2011) activation likelihood estimation meta-analysis across 93 neuroimaging studies found evidence for supramodal aesthetic appraisal components — particularly in the right hemisphere, anterior insula, and orbitofrontal cortex — alongside modality-specific processing regions. This meta-analysis provides the strongest published evidence that aesthetic appraisal across visual, musical, and textual modalities shares neural substrate, supporting the theoretical case for a domain-general aesthetic response system. However, the text studies were sparse in the meta-analysis input corpus, and the supramodal regions identified are associated with emotional appraisal and reward broadly rather than with aesthetic experience specifically. Vessel, Isik, Stahl, and colleagues' (2019) more recent fMRI work demonstrated that within the visual domain, aesthetic appeal that generalises across visual sub-categories (abstract art, figurative art, photographs) is specifically tracked by default mode network activity — the brain's self-referential processing system. Mar's (2011) neural review showed that story comprehension reliably activates the default mode network during narrative processing. The two literatures converge on the hypothesis that self-referential processing (activating autobiographical memory, imagination, and future simulation) is a common mechanism for intense aesthetic experience whether triggered by visual art or literary narrative — but the specific cross-modal comparison has not been conducted in a single study with matched stimuli and within-subject aesthetic ratings. 6.2 Processing fluency: partial transfer with important qualifications The processing-fluency account of aesthetic pleasure (Reber, Schwarz, & Winkielman, 2004) predicts that easier-to-process stimuli produce more positive aesthetic affect. In the visual domain this prediction is well supported. For text, the prediction is both partially supported and partially contradicted, making this the most theoretically productive cross-modal discrepancy in the literature. The partial support comes from Obermeier et al. (2016), whose ERP study of poetry reading demonstrated that aesthetic appreciation of poetry correlates with processing ease at the neural level — specifically, that passages rated as more beautiful show different N400 and late positive potential profiles, consistent with a role for prediction and expectation in text aesthetic pleasure. This is genuine positive transfer: processing fluency, in a form appropriate to text (syntactic and semantic predictability rather than visual contrast and symmetry), does predict aesthetic response to poetry. The contradicting evidence comes from the literary foregrounding literature (Miall & Kuiken, 1994): deliberate defamiliarisation — making language harder to process — is a central aesthetic device in literary fiction and enhances rather than reduces aesthetic response. The resolution is likely that fluency effects in text aesthetics are local and modality-specific: they operate at the level of sentence-by-sentence semantic prediction (where better prediction is more pleasant), while being overridden at a higher level by the global aesthetic value of defamiliarisation (where encountering language that resists easy assimilation signals literary ambition and rewards close attention). These operate at different levels of text processing and are probably not in genuine conflict once the relevant scale is specified. 6.3 Peak affect and chills: the strongest transfer finding The strongest positive transfer finding in the current literature is the convergence between music-induced and poetry-induced chills documented by Wassiliwizky et al. (2017). The same psychophysiological signatures — piloerection, increased skin conductance, cardiac deceleration, orbitofrontal and reward-circuit activation — that characterise peak emotional responses to music are observed during peak emotional responses to poetry. This is not merely an analogy but a documented overlap in both the phenomenological reports and the peripheral physiological measures. The implication for a text-aesthetic platform is significant: peak affect in response to text is a real and measurable phenomenon, not just a metaphor borrowed from music research. A response system designed for text can include a "being moved" or chills measure with genuine empirical precedent, and the compositional features that predict it in poetry (metric disruption at emotionally salient moments, imagery density, formal resolution) provide testable hypotheses about what will predict peak affect in prose. 6.4 What has not transferred: the curvature preference and the aesthetic aha Two major findings from visual aesthetics lack formal text-analogue tests. Bar and Neta's (2006) curvature preference — the robust preference for curved over angular visual forms — has no published text equivalent. Whether preference for syntactically "smooth" sentences, phonologically soft consonant clusters, or semantically gentle imagery follows an analogous pattern has not been formally tested. The prediction is speculative but falsifiable. Muth and Carbon's (2013) aesthetic aha — the insight-driven pleasure of suddenly understanding an ambiguous visual Gestalt — has a plausible literary analogue in the experience of resolving ambiguity in a difficult poem or understanding a delayed metaphor. Miall and Kuiken's foregrounding work suggests this exists, and the O'Sullivan et al. (2015) neural study of literary awareness, which found that processing literary versus non-literary text engages distinct neural machinery involving reappraisal circuits, provides indirect support. But a formal within-study cross-modal comparison of visual aesthetic aha and literary interpretive insight, using matched paradigms and comparable outcome measures, has not been published.

  7. Individual Differences in Text-Aesthetic Response Systematic individual differences in text-aesthetic response are less well characterised than the corresponding visual differences. The most relevant predictors currently documented are reading absorption (trait-level differences in the propensity to become immersed in text, as measured by the Tellegen Absorption Scale or the Trait Reading Absorption scale), attachment style (Rain & Mar, 2021), and dual-control arousal disposition (SIS/SES; Milhausen et al., 2010). Mar et al. (2006) showed that fiction reading frequency is associated with better social cognition across studies, suggesting that habitual fiction readers differ from non-readers in ways that predict textual aesthetic response. Whether these differences reflect selection (people with richer social cognition are drawn to fiction) or training (fiction reading develops social cognition) remains unresolved by the experimental literature, but the association itself is reliable enough to warrant inclusion as a covariate in any text-aesthetic profiling system. The most important gap in the individual-differences literature is the absence of a study that simultaneously measures visual aesthetic desire (using the Vela eight-dimension profile or equivalent), reading absorption, attachment style, and text-arousal disposition in the same participants. Whether the visual and textual aesthetic profiles correlate within individuals — and if so, which dimensions transfer and which do not — is the foundational empirical question for a cross-modal platform, and it has not been addressed.

  8. Measurement Recommendations for a Text-Aesthetic Platform Based on the literature reviewed, a credible text-aesthetic measurement system should capture at least five partially separable response dimensions. The empirical evidence reviewed here is sufficient to support treating these as distinct constructs that should not be collapsed into a single score. First, aesthetic pleasure and liking: the evaluative dimension, analogous to Vela's rating signal. The AESTHEMOS scale provides a validated multi-item measure; for a behavioural platform, save and return-to-similar signals provide implicit proxies. Second, interest and curiosity: the forward-leaning appetitive dimension most directly analogous to Vela's desire construct. Silvia's (2005) appraisal-of-novelty framework predicts this is separable from pleasure, and the AESTHEMOS interest subscale operationalises it. Third, being moved and chills: the peak-affect dimension with the strongest cross-modal evidence from the poetry literature. A single-item self-report ("did this passage give you chills or move you deeply?") with optional physiological confirmation is appropriate for a platform context. Fourth, transportation and absorption: the immersion dimension specific to narrative text, with no visual analogue. The Green and Brock Transportation Scale or the Kuijpers SWA/REI provides validated measurement. Fifth, subjective sexual arousal, when relevant to the content. The SESII-W/M subscales provide a validated framework; for platform use, a single-dimension self-report item anchored on "did this passage arouse you sexually?" is sufficient as a behavioural signal. The most important structural decision is whether to treat these as a unified desire score (as in the visual platform) or as separate dimensions that are reported and acted upon independently. The literature reviewed here suggests that for text, combining them into a single score would obscure diagnostically important information: a passage can be deeply moving without being sexually arousing, absorbing without being beautiful, and aesthetically pleasurable without inducing transportation. The five dimensions are correlated but distinguishable, and a platform that reports them separately will produce richer individual profiles.

  9. Open Research Questions Five falsifiable research questions emerged from the cross-validation of the two independent literature maps. These represent gaps that a text-aesthetic platform would be structurally positioned to address. The first asks whether processing fluency raises aesthetic pleasure in prose and microfiction the way it does in poetry and visual design. A within-subjects study manipulating syntactic ease, lexical predictability, and discourse coherence in tightly matched prose passages while measuring liking, interest, and reading times would directly test whether the Obermeier et al. (2016) ERP finding in poetry generalises to literary prose. The second asks whether default mode network activity tracks text aesthetic appeal above and beyond comprehension difficulty and self-relevance. An fMRI study comparing poetry, literary prose, genre prose, and neutral expository text with trialwise aesthetic ratings, comprehension checks, and self-relevance covariates would directly test whether the Vessel et al. (2019) visual DMN finding has a text analogue. The third asks whether there is a text analogue of the visual aesthetic aha, and whether sudden interpretive insight increases beauty more than mere understanding. A paradigm presenting poems or ambiguous literary passages with and without disambiguating cues, measuring surprise, insight, beauty, and interest, would directly test the prediction from both the Muth and Carbon (2013) visual work and the Miall and Kuiken (1994) foregrounding work. The fourth asks whether erotic and romance passages recruit the same being-moved and chills architecture as non-erotic poetry, or a partially distinct route through sexual arousal systems. A study comparing goosebump frequency, self-reported being moved, and subjective sexual arousal across poetry, romance, and erotica would directly test whether the Wassiliwizky et al. (2017) chills findings apply to erotic text or are specific to non-erotic aesthetic peak affect. The fifth asks whether attachment style and sexual excitation/inhibition moderate aesthetic response to romance and erotica texts in predictable ways. Combining attachment measures (ECR-R), the SESII-W/M, and a balanced text battery would directly test the Rain and Mar (2021) attachment-character-preference finding in the specific context of erotic and romance reading.

  10. Conclusions The literature reviewed here supports a qualified but real case for developing a text-aesthetic parallel to the Vela visual platform. The qualification is that text and image aesthetics are not parallel systems in the simple sense. Three cross-modal discrepancies — foregrounding and disfluency, the text-specific transportation construct, and the lower genital-subjective arousal concordance for textual stimuli — mean that a text-aesthetic instrument cannot be designed as a simple transposition of visual-aesthetic dimensions into textual equivalents. The positive case rests on three areas of documented transfer. Processing fluency operates in text aesthetics, albeit at a more specific level than in visual aesthetics. Peak affect and chills are documented in response to text, with the same psychophysiological signatures as music-induced chills. The default mode network, whose engagement predicts intense visual aesthetic experience, is consistently activated by narrative processing and appears to be the neural substrate for the self-relevance mechanism that Vessel et al. identified in visual art appreciation. The most important practical implication for instrument design is the five-dimension response architecture proposed in Section 8. Aesthetic pleasure, interest, being moved, transportation, and subjective sexual arousal are empirically distinguishable constructs that will produce different individual profiles in a text-aesthetic platform. Collapsing them into a single desire score would produce a platform with lower measurement sensitivity and poorer predictive validity than one that tracks them separately. The visual platform's unified desire score reflects the relative simplicity of visual aesthetic response; text aesthetic response is more heterogeneous, and the instrument should reflect that heterogeneity.

Methodological Notes Reconciliation note: Panero et al. (2016) is cited in one parallel draft as appearing in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (DOI: 10.1037/xge0000107) and in the other as appearing in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (DOI: 10.1037/pspa0000064). Both citations refer to the same research group's replication attempts but may refer to different papers in the same programme. Both DOIs should be verified against publisher pages before final citation. Allen and Walter on self-reported arousal to text versus image: neither parallel draft located this citation with a verifiable DOI. Schmidt et al. (1973) and Scott and Cortez (2011) are included as the verified text-arousal anchors. If a specific Allen and Walter paper was intended, the journal name or year is needed. Gerrig (1993) Experiencing Narrative Worlds: the foundational book for the transportation concept was treated as a contextual reference in both parallel drafts rather than a primary citation row, because neither draft located a stable verified URL quickly enough to include it. The Green and Brock (2000) Transportation Scale paper is included as the primary empirical citation for the transportation construct.

References Bar, M., & Neta, M. (2006). Humans prefer curved visual objects. Psychological Science, 17(8), 645–648. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01759.x Blood, A. J., & Zatorre, R. J. (2001). Intensely pleasurable responses to music correlate with activity in brain regions implicated in reward and emotion. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 98(20), 11818–11823. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.191355898 Brown, S., Gao, X., Tisdelle, L., Eickhoff, S. B., & Liotti, M. (2011). Naturalizing aesthetics: Brain areas for aesthetic appraisal across sensory modalities. NeuroImage, 58(1), 250–258. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2011.06.012 Chatterjee, A., & Vartanian, O. (2014). Neuroaesthetics. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 18(7), 370–375. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2014.03.003 Chivers, M. L., Rieger, G., Latty, E., & Bailey, J. M. (2004). A sex difference in the specificity of sexual arousal. Psychological Science, 15(11), 736–744. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0956-7976.2004.00750.x Chivers, M. L., Seto, M. C., Lalumière, M. L., Laan, E., & Grimbos, T. (2010). Agreement of self-reported and genital measures of sexual arousal in men and women: A meta-analysis. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 39(1), 5–56. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-009-9556-9 Dodell-Feder, D., & Tamir, D. I. (2018). Fiction reading has a small positive impact on social cognition: A meta-analysis. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 147(11), 1713–1727. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000395 Graham, C. A., Sanders, S. A., Milhausen, R. R., & McBride, K. R. (2006). Turning on and turning off: A focus group study of the factors that affect women's sexual arousal. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 33(6), 527–538. [For the women's SIS/SES instrument development, see also Milhausen et al. (2010).] Green, M. C., & Brock, T. C. (2000). The role of transportation in the persuasiveness of public narratives. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79(5), 701–721. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.79.5.701 Hakemulder, F. (2000). The moral laboratory: Experiments examining the effects of reading literature on social perception and moral self-concept. John Benjamins. Janssen, E., Vorst, H., Finn, P., & Bancroft, J. (2002). The sexual inhibition (SIS) and sexual excitation (SES) scales: I. Measuring sexual inhibition and excitation proneness in men. Journal of Sex Research, 39(2), 114–126. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224490209552130 Johnson-Laird, P. N., Mancini, F., & Gangemi, A. (2022). How poetry evokes emotions. Acta Psychologica, 224, 103506. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000169182200021X Kidd, D. C., & Castano, E. (2013). Reading literary fiction improves theory of mind. Science, 342(6156), 377–380. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1239918 Kraxenberger, M., Popescu, A., & Menninghaus, W. (2021). Who reads contemporary erotic novels and why? Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 8, Article 115. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-021-00764-3 Kuijpers, M. M., Hakemulder, F., Tan, E. S., & Doicaru, M. M. (2014). Exploring absorbing reading experiences: Developing and validating a self-report scale to measure story world absorption. Scientific Study of Literature, 4(1), 89–122. https://doi.org/10.1075/ssol.4.1.06kui Kuijpers, M. M., et al. (2024). Validation of the Story World Absorption Scale through omnibus sampling. Cultural Analytics. https://culturalanalytics.org/article/id/877/ Laan, E., & Everaerd, W. (1995). Determinants of subjective experience of sexual arousal in women: Feedback from genital arousal and erotic stimulus content. Psychophysiology, 32(5), 476–485. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-8986.1995.tb02095.x Liebers, N., & Schramm, H. (2017). Friends in books: The influence of character attributes and the reading experience on parasocial relationships and romances with book characters. Poetics, 65, 12–23. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0304422X16302455 Mar, R. A. (2011). The neural bases of social cognition and story comprehension. Annual Review of Psychology, 62, 103–134. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-120709-145406 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. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-6924.2008.00073.x Mar, R. A., Oatley, K., Hirsh, J., de la Paz, J., & Peterson, J. B. (2006). Bookworms versus nerds: Exposure to fiction versus nonfiction, divergent associations with social ability, and the simulation of fictional social worlds. Journal of Research in Personality, 40(5), 694–712. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2005.08.002 Menninghaus, W., Wagner, V., Hanich, J., Wassiliwizky, E., Kuehnast, M., & Jacobsen, T. (2015). Towards a psychological construct of being moved. PLOS ONE, 10(6), e0128451. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0128451 Menninghaus, W., Wagner, V., Wassiliwizky, E., Schindler, I., Hanich, J., Jacobsen, T., & Koelsch, S. (2019). What are aesthetic emotions? Psychological Review, 126(2), 171–195. https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000135 Menninghaus, W., Wagner, V., Hanich, J., Wassiliwizky, E., Jacobsen, T., & Koelsch, S. (2017). The distancing-embracing model of the enjoyment of negative emotions in art reception. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 40, e347. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X17000309 Miall, D. S., & Kuiken, D. (1994). Foregrounding, defamiliarization, and affect: Response to literary stories. Poetics, 22(5), 389–407. https://doi.org/10.1016/0304-422X(94)00009-V Milhausen, R. R., Graham, C. A., Sanders, S. A., Yarber, W. L., & Maitland, S. B. (2010). Validation of the Sexual Excitation/Sexual Inhibition Inventory for Women and Men (SESII-W/M). Archives of Sexual Behavior, 39(5), 1043–1053. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-009-9554-y Muth, C., & Carbon, C. C. (2013). The aesthetic aha: On the pleasure of having insights into Gestalt. Acta Psychologica, 144(1), 25–30. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2013.02.004 Neves, C. F., Nobre, P., & Pereira, M. (2016). Sexual Excitation/Sexual Inhibition Inventory (SESII-W/M): Adaptation and validation within a Portuguese sample of men and women. Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy, 42(6), 530–547. https://doi.org/10.1080/0092623X.2015.1113579 Obermeier, C., Menninghaus, W., von Koppenfels, M., Raettig, T., Schmidt-Kassow, M., Otterbein, S., & Kotz, S. A. (2016). Aesthetic and emotional effects of meter and rhyme in poetry. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 10. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-015-0396-x O'Sullivan, N., Davis, P., Billington, J., González-Díaz, V., & Corcoran, R. (2015). The neural basis of literary awareness, and its benefits to cognition. Cortex, 73, 144–157. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26409018/ Panero, M. E., Weisberg, D. S., Black, J., Goldstein, T. R., Barnes, J. L., Brownell, H., & Winner, E. (2016). Does reading a single passage of literary fiction really improve theory of mind? An attempt at replication. [Citation discrepancy between parallel drafts: DOI 10.1037/xge0000107 (JEPG) and DOI 10.1037/pspa0000064 (JPSP); verify at publisher.] Radway, J. A. (1984). Reading the romance: Women, patriarchy, and popular literature. University of North Carolina Press. Rain, M., & Mar, R. A. (2021). Adult attachment and engagement with fictional characters. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 38(9), 2792–2813. https://doi.org/10.1177/02654075211018513 Reber, R., Schwarz, N., & Winkielman, P. (2004). Processing fluency and aesthetic pleasure: Is beauty in the perceiver's processing experience? Personality and Social Psychology Review, 8(4), 364–382. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327957pspr0804_3 Salmon, C. (2012). The pop culture of sex: An evolutionary window on the worlds of pornography and romance. Review of General Psychology, 16(2), 152–160. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0027910 Samur, D., Tops, M., & Koole, S. L. (2018). Does a single session of reading literary fiction prime enhanced mentalising performance? Four replication experiments of Kidd and Castano (2013). Cognition and Emotion, 32(1), 130–144. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2017.1279591 Schindler, I., Hosoya, G., Menninghaus, W., Haas, U., Wagner, V., Hanich, J., & Jacobsen, T. (2017). Measuring aesthetic emotions: A review of the literature and a new assessment tool. PLOS ONE, 12(6), e0178899. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0178899 Schmidt, G., Sigusch, V., & Schäfer, S. (1973). Responses to reading erotic stories: Male-female differences. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 2(3), 181–199. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01541755 Scott, C. L., & Cortez, A. (2011). No longer his and hers, but ours: Examining sexual arousal in response to erotic stories designed for both sexes. Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy, 37(2), 78–93. https://doi.org/10.1080/0092623X.2011.560529 Silvia, P. J. (2005). Emotional responses to art: From collation and arousal to cognition and emotion. Review of General Psychology, 9(4), 342–357. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.9.4.342 van Kuijk, I., Verkoeijen, P. P. J. L., Dijkstra, K., & Zwaan, R. A. (2018). The effect of reading a short passage of literary fiction on Theory of Mind: A replication of Kidd and Castano (2013). Collabra: Psychology, 4(1), 7. https://doi.org/10.1525/collabra.117 Velten, J., Scholten, S., Graham, C. A., Adolph, D., & Margraf, J. (2018). Psychometric properties of the Sexual Excitation/Sexual Inhibition Inventory for Women and Men in a German sample. PLOS ONE, 13(3), e0193080. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0193080 Vessel, E. A., Isik, A. I., Stahl, J., Maurer, P., & Bhatt, P. (2019). The default-mode network represents aesthetic appeal that generalizes across visual domains. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(38), 19155–19164. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1902650116 Wassiliwizky, E., Koelsch, S., Wagner, V., Jacobsen, T., & Menninghaus, W. (2017). The emotional power of poetry: Neural circuitry, psychophysiology and compositional principles. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 12(8), 1229–1240. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsx069