Watching Disgustedly? Game of Thrones and Disgust Sensitivity.

The HBO show Game of Thrones is fascinating, because despite many of its plot points involving the elicitation of disgust, an emotion associated with avoidance behaviors, its viewership has only surged. We explore the relationship between disgust sensitivity and perception of scenes involving moral, sexual, and pathogen disgust in the show by providing participants with descriptions of such scenes. Participants included those who had never seen the show, those who had seen the show at least once, and those who had seen the show multiple times. We found that those who had watched the show once rated the scenes as less disgusting (overall and for moral and sexual disgust) than those who had not. We also investigated sex differences in disgust and found that women rated the scenes as more aversive than men, especially those involving moral and sexual disgust. Finally, those with more opposite sex siblings were more repulsed by the scenes, especially those involving sexual disgust. The present study adds to a long list of studies that analyses popular culture from an adaptive lens and adds to the notion that popular culture is a 'cultural remain' of the evolved human mind.

Narrative structure of A Song of Ice and Fire creates a fictional world with realistic measures of social complexity.

Network science and data analytics are used to quantify static and dynamic structures in George R. R. Martin's epic novels, A Song of Ice and Fire, works noted for their scale and complexity. By tracking the network of character interactions as the story unfolds, it is found that structural properties remain approximately stable and comparable to real-world social networks. Furthermore, the degrees of the most connected characters reflect a cognitive limit on the number of concurrent social connections that humans tend to maintain. We also analyze the distribution of time intervals between significant deaths measured with respect to the in-story timeline. These are consistent with power-law distributions commonly found in interevent times for a range of nonviolent human activities in the real world. We propose that structural features in the narrative that are reflected in our actual social world help readers to follow and to relate to the story, despite its sprawling extent. It is also found that the distribution of intervals between significant deaths in chapters is different to that for the in-story timeline; it is geometric rather than power law. Geometric distributions are memoryless in that the time since the last death does not inform as to the time to the next. This provides measurable support for the widely held view that significant deaths in A Song of Ice and Fire are unpredictable chapter by chapter.

Analyzing the public discourse on works of fiction - Detection and visualization of emotion in online coverage about HBO's Game of Thrones.

This paper presents a Web intelligence portal that captures and aggregates news and social media coverage about "Game of Thrones", an American drama television series created for the HBO television network based on George R.R. Martin's series of fantasy novels. The system collects content from the Web sites of Anglo-American news media as well as from four social media platforms: Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and YouTube. An interactive dashboard with trend charts and synchronized visual analytics components not only shows how often Game of Thrones events and characters are being mentioned by journalists and viewers, but also provides a real-time account of concepts that are being associated with the unfolding storyline and each new episode. Positive or negative sentiment is computed automatically, which sheds light on the perception of actors and new plot elements.

Compreensão psicodinâmica do ciclo vital de Daenerys Targaryen, personagem da série Game of Thrones / Psychodynamic understanding of "Daenerys Targaryen's" life cycle, character from the series "Game of Thrones"

Este artigo analisa os aspectos psicológicos da personagem Daenerys Targaryen, da série Game of thrones, buscando essencialmente avaliar sua evolução cognitiva, social e comportamental, bem como os conflitos vivenciados em seu ciclo vital e os respectivos mecanismos de enfrentamento das adversidades. Por meio da interpretação subjetiva das simbologias metafóricas citadas na narrativa, extrapola-se a leitura literal da obra, com vistas a compreender também as representações da esfera inconsciente da personagem. Daenerys tem infância conturbada pela morte dos pais, pela fuga da cidade natal, pelo exílio e pelos maus-tratos cometidos pelo irmão. Ademais, são-lhe impostos casamento e erotização precoces, eventos que desrespeitam seu tempo de amadurecimento psíquico, desencadeando encurtamento das fases do seu ciclo vital e desestabilização do processo de latência e desenvolvimento puberal. Contudo, as experiências que vivencia no período, tais quais a gestação e a emancipação por que passa, associadas a variantes inatas da sua personalidade - a exemplo do temperamento dócil, inteligência e autoconfiança na capacidade de resolução de vicissitudes -, permitem a expressão de uma figura icônica de resiliência, com ativação de defesas maduras frente a crises vitais ou acidentais. O estudo permitiu discutir aspectos da realidade contemporânea do desenvolvimento humano e proceder à observação de diversos mecanismos de funcionamento psíquico, além da interação entre variantes intrínsecas e extrínsecas moduladoras da expressão de resiliência frente às dificuldades. Este artigo visa a contribuir para o estudo da teoria psicodinâmica e deve interessar a profissionais da medicina e da psicologia.(AU)

This article analyzes the psychological aspects of character Daenerys Targaryen, from Game of Thrones' series, seeking essentially to evaluate her cognitive, social and behavioral evolution, as well as the conflicts experienced to each stage of her life cycle and related adversity coping mechanisms. Through subjective interpretation of metaphoric symbols mentioned in the narrative, the literal reading of the story is extrapolated in order to also comprehend representations of the character's unconscious domain. Daenerys goes through a troubled childhood due to her parents' death, fleeing from her home city, exile and mistreatment committed by her brother. Furthermore, events like marriage and early erotization are imposed to her, which disrespect her psychic development timing, causing shortening of her life cycle's stages, and destabilization of the latency phase process and her pubertal development. Nevertheless, the experiences she goes through in this period, such as pregnancy and emancipation, associated to innate variants of her personality - docile temperament, high cognition and self-confidence in the ability of resolving difficulties -, allow the expression of a resilient iconic figure, with the activation of mature defenses when facing vital or accidental crises. The study allows transpositions to contemporaneous reality of human development and observation of several mechanisms of psychic functions, besides the interaction between intrinsic and extrinsic variants, which modulate the expression of resilience when confronting distress. It contributes to the study of psychodynamic theory and may be of interest to doctors and psychologists, especially those directly involved in psychic development.(AU)