FEATURED MIND: EMILY TROSCIANKO
“Emily Troscianko Collage” by Sue Blackmore
Emily Troscianko is a visiting scholar with the Literature and Mind research center’s Trauma-Informed Pedagogy Project. Additionally, she is a writer and coach with a diverse range of interests. She has a Ph.D. in German literature and a Master’s degree in French and German from the University of Oxford. Her research spans cognitive literary studies and health humanities, where she explores how human minds interact with literary texts. Emily co-authored a leading textbook on consciousness—Consciousness: An Introduction, with Sue Blackmore—and has done extensive research on the psychological effects of reading narrative. Beyond academia, she is deeply engaged in understanding eating disorders and their impact. Alongside the coaching she offers to individuals in recovery, Emily writes a blog called “A Hunger Artist” for Psychology Today, shedding light on the complexities of these conditions.
What made you decide to come to UCSB as a visiting scholar?
I came because of the very lovely people. I visited UCSB in May 2023 to run events on reading, writing, and failure, and I stayed in touch with my Lit & Mind colleagues that summer, brainstorming ideas for a possible summer course called “Anxious to Write.” The course would be about the anxiety and other trauma-related experiences that often go together with writing, and also about the positive flipside: being anxious to write in the sense of keen to write. Although we couldn’t make the course happen for this year, we enjoyed our chats and hatched the idea of a visiting year. Now I’m around the halfway point, and the time here feels like it’s passing by very quickly!
Building on the writing event I ran last year, I’ll be providing some more writing workshops for the Graduate Division with the aim of joining the dots between what I’ve been doing in my coaching and writing-support work and what the Trauma-Informed Pedagogy Project is focused on. For instance, we’ll ask for feedback before and after the workshops to figure out which trauma-informed methods are working best for participants, which ones they hate, and which seem most relevant to their lives beyond the group events. It’ll be good to get a more detailed understanding of what people need when they’re struggling with writing, so I’m looking forward to this kind of data-gathering. Hopefully it will be helpful to the project as well as helping individual students with actually writing.
What influenced your transition from modern languages to the field of cognitive literary studies?
Just before I started my PhD, I had funding to do a literary studies project about a topic that was mostly my supervisor’s idea. That summer, I found myself seriously questioning whether I was actually interested in the project at all. I talked to my parents, who were scientists, and they asked me whether there was any question I would really like to formulate and answer. If yes, what was it, and if no, maybe I shouldn’t do a PhD! This was a helpful way for me to approach my mini crisis, realizing that the question I really wanted to answer was “what makes Kafka’s writing so weird and wonderful?” As soon as I formulated the question in a simple way like that, I realized that it was actually a cognitive question: what does this kind of writing do to readers, why do we react the way we do? Rather late in the day, I discovered that there was a field called cognitive literary studies that could give me some direction in working out my methods.
What made you interested in health humanities?
After doing quite a few years of research on how people respond to texts and how features of text generate certain effects, I started to realize that I’d been thinking a lot about the text and the reader’s mind as parts of the reading process but not about specific contexts in which you encounter texts. One example of such a context is having an illness, or recovering from one. So, for example, how can we investigate the difference in reading experiences and interpretations that arise when someone currently has or used to have an eating disorder compared to someone who has never had such an illness? There was also an aspect of personal experience feeding into this realization, wondering whether my own past experience of an eating disorder was changing the way I was reading and interpreting things, especially when they were about eating or not-eating or hunger. So, it struck me that there was something big I’d been missing here—and that most other people had been missing it too. I was really interested in what we might find out by bringing health and illness into the mix when asking questions about what affects how we read, and how reading has effects back on other things in life.
How do you personally connect the two fields of cognitive literary science and health humanities in your research?
I find it strange that they’re not always connected. For me, they just seem to obviously go together. If you want to start answering questions about the health effects (or any other effects) of reading, then you need to do something like what’s done in cognitive and empirical literary studies. And if you want to know about what happens when people read, taking health and illness into account generally makes sense as one of the contextual factors that will always be in play in some way. So the insights and methods from both areas should join forces much more often than they do, I think. I made this argument in a keynote for IGEL, the International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature, a couple of years ago, and I really hope this kind of interplay will soon get more common.
Can you talk briefly about your primary research strand where you explore how minds and texts interact in the context of illness?
The thing that got me started was the big online survey study that I ran in 2015 with the U.K. eating disorder charity BEAT. We got a massive number of responses, almost 900, often including a lot of rich free-text detail. One of the main findings was the dramatic contrast between the effects of reading fiction about eating disorders versus respondents’ preferred type of other fiction. It turned out that our respondents overwhelmingly perceived the effects of eating-disorder fiction to be strongly negative on all four dimensions we asked about: mood, self-esteem, how you feel about your body, and your diet and exercise habits. By contrast, whatever other kind of fiction people liked to read tended to be reported as neutral or positive in its effects—and particularly likely to be positive for mood. I was really struck by this contrast, since it’s a common idea that when you’re struggling with something you should seek out books about what you are going through—and this basic common-sense principle is present in bibliotherapy theory too. The general idea there is that you might learn something from the character’s story, maybe emotionally identify with them, and translate the insights back onto yourself and into your own life. The effect was apparently the opposite for the vast majority of people who completed our survey, and this got me really intrigued.
There have been a few empirical studies since that survey study, one by a collaborator in Spain, Rocío Riestra Camacho. She had a very clever method for getting at this question—about the help or harm that may come from reading about eating disorders—indirectly: she chose to use the genre of young adult sports fiction, which deals with themes around food, body, and exercise, but not with the risks inherent in reading about full-on pathology. She also developed a cool reading guide method where one group reads the books normally and the other reads them together with a set of prompts and questions designed to guide them away from eating-disordered thinking. She found some really interesting effects related to the decrease in gender-normative body beliefs, specifically for the group who read the books with the reading guide. This suggests that if you’re reading with helpful interpretive supports in place, then you can shift some of the potential effects further towards the positive.
In a study that’s hopefully about to be published, I’d ended up mostly accidentally writing a memoir about my own recovery experience, and when I finished it I realized I should be ethically responsible and find out whether it was likely to have all the awful effects that the Beat survey respondents had reported from reading eating disorder narratives. In the end, I designed an experiment to determine whether publishing the novel was likely to be detrimental to readers. We had lots of difficulty working out the measures and the control condition and so on, and overall it was a huge amount of work—and a lot of money that was all self-funded. But the results were really striking: both for the control text (a book about Zen meditation written by my mother) and for the eating disorder text, there were significant improvements on both the clinical measures we used. This finding means that the book will be published soon, and it also raises some interesting questions about what precisely is generating the improvement. It also suggests, though, that in the right conditions, reading about eating disorders can be therapeutically positive rather than the opposite.
In collaboration with researchers internationally, you are creating a full recovery narrative database for eating disorders. How do you see this database making an impact in both a global context and for analytical purposes?
It’s extremely widespread, the claim that it is not possible to fully recover from an eating disorder, that once you’ve had one you’ll always be struggling and the best you can hope for is remission. I think this is both wrong (partly because I consider myself to be fully recovered) and pretty depressing—and therefore dangerous. So, I’m interested in the counterpoint: the idea of full recovery and what it means. For the database idea, I’m actually having some doubts at the moment about whether the project is viable. The idea was to provide a platform where people who consider themselves fully recovered can write a narrative about their recovery process and others can read these stories and learn—and draw confidence—from them and from the simple multiple-choice statistics we also planned to gather, on things like how long the whole process took, whether it involved professional help of any kind, and so on. There’s a lot of stuff online about illness and partial recovery, but not a lot about the recovery efforts that actually work. Of course, if you write an eating disorder blog and you recover fully, you’re quite likely to ditch the blog and have a nice life, so it makes sense that there is this bias against full recovery in online material. I thought it’d be good to counteract that and make it easy for those who get better to report on how they did so. Unfortunately, the more my colleague Paul Jenkins and I thought about it, the more it seemed to be a nightmare to make it happen, particularly with respect to the practicalities of data protection and moderation. For instance, there might be someone who said they had fully recovered, but whose narrative suggested to us that this wasn’t the case. What would we do then? We decided that instead we might reach out to a group at Nottingham University in the UK who are doing a similar thing in a way that seems impressively systematic, and see whether we could usefully piggyback on what they’re doing. In the meantime, the backup plan is to collaborate on a short book about full recovery for Bloomsbury’s medical humanities series; we’re currently at the stage of brainstorming, doing some very rough drafting, and deciding whether to commit!
Reading your profile on our website, you are a coach and writer. How do these roles complement or influence your research?
I like this question, because I’ve thought a lot about the opposite one: how does my research feed into my coaching? I’ve not thought so much about this way around. One obvious answer is that I’m working every day with individuals in recovery from an eating disorder, so in that sense I’m continually gathering evidence about what forms this illness takes and what makes recovery possible, or gets in the way of it. This kind of 1-1 work is great for having your assumptions challenged, and for getting multiple opportunities to test informal hypotheses about what helps and what doesn’t. As for writing, well, I’m the kind of person who relies massively on writing to have complex thoughts about anything. Writing is, in effect, how I think best.
What are your future research interests or projects that you are excited about exploring?
It’s interesting that you ask this question because right now, I’m doing a lot to try to make my life simpler. I’ve found myself wondering whether writing and coaching are more important than research for this phase in my career. I think what I do will always have a strong research component, but maybe that doesn’t need to keep looking like running formal experiments and doing other kinds of systematic academic research. I think this full recovery project is going to play an important part in figuring out how I’m going to divide up my time and energy amongst these three broad domains in the years to come.
LEARN MORE:
Emily’s Psychology Today blog: https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/hunger-artist
The 2018 paper on the Beat survey: https://jeatdisord.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40337-018-0191-5
The 2023 paper on reading-guide sports fiction study: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/02762374231196404 (or find the full text on Emily’s personal website: https://troscianko.com/publications/)
Her keynote from IGEL 2022: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6ttjpT4770
