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This chapter summarizes the main findings of the book. The aim of this book has been to show the way in which cognitions and emotions in the experience of viewing visual fiction are part of a holistic framework. This holism has its origin in the way that fictions are experienced by the viewer. Central elements in the book can be summed up by some key concepts including holism, ecological conventions, reality-simulation, and aesthetic flow.

This introductory chapter begins by setting out the purpose of the book, which is to describe the experience of viewing visual fiction and the way in which this experience is created by the interaction between fiction and viewer. It proposes that cognitive and perceptual processes are intimately linked with emotional processes within a functionally unified psychosomatic whole. Because visual fictions are experienced in time, a description of the interaction between cognition and emotion will be concerned with temporal flow. The theories and models for describing the flow of experiences must be brought together from several disciplines: film theory, first and foremost; and general aesthetics, narrative theory, neuroscience, physiology, and cognitive science. An overview of the subsequent chapters is presented.

This chapter summarizes some of the characteristic dimensions that produce emotions in visual fiction, and uses these dimensions to formulate a typology of prototypical emotion-producing genres. The eight prototypical genre-patterns in visual fiction, based on their emotional effect on the viewer, are: lyricism, canonical narratives, obsessional fictions, melodramas, horror fictions, schizoid fictions, comic fictions, and metafictions.

This chapter presents a general outline of the way in which the brain processes information and the connections between this processing and the basic structures of visual fiction. It describes the ways in which basic forms of aesthetic experience are related to perceptual, associational, and sequential structures, and to innate autonomic emotional reactions. It provides models of the experiential flow, based on the mental flow from perception via emotional evaluation and cognitions to enaction; and it shows that experienced modal qualities of the flow (intense, saturated, tense, and autonomic experiences) are effects of the mental flow as cued by narratives.

This chapter first examines the way in which subjectivity in film is often produced by causality and restrictions that refocus attention to proximal sites of experience. It then characterizes the way in which temporal experiences are subjective, but cued by a set of cognitive and affective parameters in the diegetic world. It demonstrates the means by which temporal experiences provide modal tones to visual fiction.

This chapter demonstrates that emotional empathy and cognitive identification play a crucial role in the reception of visual fiction, and also that cognition and emotion are two different aspects of one information system. It uses an example from Psycho to illustrate the means by which cognitive identification causes empathy, because cognition is intimately linked to motivation. It analyses the intersubjective status of emotions and describes the cognitive labelling of emotions as a narrative strategy. It also discusses the way in which narrative processes can be described as homeostatic systems, that is, as an alternative to the psychoanalytic description of narration as driven by ‘narrative desire’. The chapter examines the applicability of two concepts of homeostasis — telic and paratelic motivation — as tools for describing visual fiction and entertainment.