Softening Violence with Verse Data

This is the combined data from our experiment that investigated the influences between aesthetic and moral processing in narrative texts. The data is organized by participant and question. Each question was answered using continuous 7-point Likert scales.

We specifically looked at whether processing fluency in aesthetics, as modulated by rhyme and meter, and genre expectation, targeted by presentation as poetry or prose, affect the aesthetic and moral processing of narratives. To do so, we created narratives that had 4 levels of violence depicted in them, ranging from "no violence" to "high violence." For each text, we then created 4 versions: aesthetic poetry, non-aesthetic poetry, aesthetic prose, non-aesthetic prose. For these texts, "aesthetic" means that the texts were written with consistent meter and rhyme, while "non-aesthetic" means that the texts did not include consistent rhyme or meter. In our experiment, participants read one of these stories then used 7-point Likert scales to rate the story on the following dimensions: how upsetting the text is; how bad the actions in the text are; how severely the man in the text should be punished; how immoral the actions are; how melodious the language of the text is; how beautiful the language of the text is.

Using a generalized linear model in SPSS, we found that violent content predicted higher ratings for how upsetting, punishable, and immoral the actions in the text are, and lower ratings of how beautiful the text is. We also found that both aesthetic quality (rhyme and meter) and presentation as poetry each separately predicted higher ratings for how beautiful and melodious the text was perceived to be. We also found a slight negative but nonsignificant effect of rhyme and meter on how upsetting violence in the texts was perceived to be. Together, these findings support a processing fluency view of aesthetic pleasure. They also suggest that presentation as poetry makes texts be perceived as more beautiful and melodious. Finally, these findings suggest that violence in texts makes those texts be perceived as both more immoral and less beautiful, even though this violence does not affect the perceived melodiousness of the language itself.

Overall, these results lend support to the idea that, in texts, aesthetic quality and moral value each have both an intuitive dimension for how they are experienced as well as a rational dimension for how they are judged and assessed. Moreover, we find that while moral and aesthetic judgment remain distinct, they may blend in their experiential processing.