What makes a poem appealing? People prefer poetry that paints a vivid picture, according to a new study from a trio of researchers, including Pomona College President G. Gabrielle Starr, a scholar of English literature and neuroscience.

The research, which appears in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, seeks to answer an age-old question—“Why do we like what we like?”—by gauging what we find aesthetically pleasing in poetry.

The researchers had more than 400 participants read and rate poems of two genres—haiku and sonnet. After reading each poem, participants answered questions about:

• Vividness—How vivid is the imagery evoked by this poem?
• Emotional arousal—How relaxing or stimulating is this poem?
• Emotional valence—How positive or negative is the content of this poem? (For example, a poem about death might be negative, while a poem about beautiful flowers might be positive.)
• Aesthetic appeal—How enjoyable or aesthetically appealing did you find this poem?

The results showed that poems that evoked greater imagery were more aesthetically pleasing. Emotional valence also predicted aesthetic appeal, though to a lesser extent; specifically, poems that were found to be more positive were generally found to be more appealing. By contrast, emotional arousal did not have a clear relationship to aesthetic appeal.

Amy Belfi, a postdoctoral fellow at New York University (NYU) at the time of the research, is the lead author. Her co-authors are President Starr, previously dean of NYU’s College of Arts and Science, and Edward Vessel, a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Germany. Belfi is now an assistant professor of psychological science at Missouri University of Science and Technology.

Notably, readers differed greatly in what poems they found appealing. Nonetheless, there is common ground—vividness of imagery and emotional valence—in what explains these tastes, even if they vary.

“The vividness of a poem consistently predicted its aesthetic appeal,” notes Starr, author of Feeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience (MIT Press). “Therefore, it seems that vividness of mental imagery may be a key component influencing what we like more broadly.”

“While limited to poetry,” she adds, “our work sheds light into which components most influence our aesthetic judgments and paves the way for future research investigating how we make such judgments in other domains.”

Starr’s research frequently reaches across disciplines, from the humanities into neuroscience. A recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, she looks closely at the brain, through the use of fMRI, to get to the heart of how people respond to paintings, music and other forms of art.

She became president of Pomona College in July 2017 after 15 years at NYU, where she conducted research with Belfi.

New Critical Inquiry Courses

Call it Sagehen submersion. Twice a week, first-year students participate in one of 30 Critical Inquiry (ID1) sections—intensive classes that introduce new students to both the joy and the rigor of academia at Pomona. Last fall, there were 30 sections, including10 brand-new courses. Here are a few with intriguing titles.

iSubmit to iSpy

Media Studies Professor Mark Andrejevic says the inspiration for this course came from the recognition that this group of students will be part of the most comprehensively monitored, tracked and data-mined generation in history.

Language and Food

Professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science Mary Paster wanted to examine the similarities, differences and connections between language and food. “A culture’s entire way of thinking about and interacting with food can communicate much more complicated things,” she says, “like values, religious beliefs and social hierarchies.”

Say It in a Letter

“There is so much to learn from letters of the past,” says Professor of Art Mercedes Teixido. “As artifacts, they are an extension of the hand of the writer; as a document they capture the writer’s mind in a moment of time.” The course was designed to help students find their writing voice in several ways as they read and write letters that are personal and public, local and global.

The First Crusade: Monks of War

Professor of History and Classics Kenneth Wolf’s class was inspired by the involvement of monks with warriors and their “holy violence” between the years 900 and 1150.

Running for Office

Politics Professor Amanda Hollis-Brusky designed her course “to dig deeper into the reasons why we have the elected officials we have and, more importantly, what would need to happen to change our politics by changing who runs for elected office.” She hopes some of her students may eventually throw their hats into the ring.

Into Desert Oneness

One person’s wasteland may be another person’s wonderland, says Professor of Geology Jade Star Lackey, who has crisscrossed the American West for years in his research. The class looked at complex interactions between people and the natural desert.

PSYCHOLOGY: Assistant Professor Ajay Satpute

Thinking in Black and White

When people are asked to describe their emotions in black and white terms, it actually changes the way they feel, according to a new study published in the journal Psychological SCIENCE by lead author Ajay Satpute, assistant professor of psychology at Pomona College, and principal investigator Kevin Ochsner, professor of psychology at Columbia University. Given only two extreme answers to choose from with no gray area to ponder, participants’ feelings in turn shifted to whichever extreme they were hovering closest to. The research has implications for everything from the legal system to daily social interactions.

To function in society, it is important for people to be able to perceive and understand emotional experiences—both internally (for example perceiving if you are feeling good or bad) and externally (perceiving if someone else is feeling calm or angry). This emotion perception helps inform our decisions and actions. And according to Satpute, that emotion perception is actually changed when we’re nudged to think categorically.

“If you think about your emotions in black and white terms, you’re more prone to feeling emotions that are consistent with the category you select,” says Satpute. “Extreme thinking about emotions leads to emotions that are more likely to be extreme.”

In one experiment, participants were asked to judge photographs of facial expressions that were morphed from calm to fearful in two ways. In one set of trials, participants had to choose either ‘calm’ or ‘fearful’ to describe each facial expression. In the second set of trials, participants had a continuous range, with ‘calm’ and ‘fearful’ as anchors on a graded scale. Results indicated that categorical thinking (either calm or fearful) shifted the threshold for perceiving fear or calm. In essence, when a person has to think about something categorically it changes how they feel about it—pushing them over the edge, in a manner of speaking—if they didn’t have strong feelings about it beforehand. These shifts correlated with neural activity in the amygdala and the insula, parts of the brain that are considered important for orienting attention to emotionally salient information and responding accordingly.

“While these findings were observed when judging another person’s emotions, they were reproduced in a second study in which participants judged their own feelings in response to aversive graphic photographs,” Satpute explains. “So black and white thinking not only affects how you perceive others’ emotions, but also how you perceive your own.

“You could think of it from an optimism perspective but with a twist,” he adds. “Our results suggest that if you say that the glass is half empty, the water may actually lower, so to speak.”

He explains further in his paper, “Our findings suggest that categorical judgments—especially when made about people, behaviors, or options that fall in the gray zone—may change our perception and mental representation of these targets to be consistent with the category selected.”

Consider a juror who must decide whether a police officer on trial acted out of fear or anger when shooting a suspect. Such a judgment involves thinking about emotions in “black and white” terms rather than in shades of gray. Evidence presented in a trial will lead the juror to make a determination: Did the officer act out of anger or objectively reasonable fear? (Fear of imminent threat to their life or others’ lives or serious bodily harm?) The categorical nature of the decision helps determine how justice is meted out.

Or think of faces. They move in gradations, says Satpute, but people typically talk about these expressions in categorical terms, calling them expressions of “fear” or “calm,” for instance. Similarly, when people perceive their own emotions, their bodily signals may vary continuously, but they often talk about feeling “good” or “bad.”

For a lighter example, consider the 2015 computer-animated movie Inside Out. In the film, each emotion is personified into a character: Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust. There is little room for gray areas—hardly any mixing of emotions—the protagonist is either sad, angry, fearful or happy. The film effectively makes young viewers think about emotions categorically, and thus, may change how they experience emotions.

Satpute is a psychologist and neuroscientist studying the neural basis of emotion and social perception. His research is focused on revealing how people categorize subjective experiences, particularly evaluative categories like good and bad or hedonic categories like pleasant and unpleasant or emotions such as fear, anger or happiness. A long-term goal of his work is to use neuroscience to enable predictions for the kinds of categories people use to describe experience.

HISTORY AND CHICANA/0 LATINA/0 STUDIES: Associate Professor Tomás Summers Sandoval

Vietnam Veteranos

Pomona College Associate Professor of History and Chicana/o Latina/o Studies Tomás Summers Sandoval is working to bring the stories of Latino veterans of the Vietnam War to the stage. The project is a continuation of his multi-year research, collecting and documenting oral histories of the veterans and their families. Summers Sandoval is one of eight humanities scholars from across the country awarded a 2017 Whiting Public Engagement Fellowship. The $50,000 grant will fund “Vietnam Veteranos,” his storytelling theatre project to premiere in spring 2018.

The Whiting Public Engagement Fellowship is a new humanities program for faculty members pursuing projects to engage directly with the public beyond the academy.

“Vietnam Veteranos: Latino Testimonies of the War” takes root from Summers Sandoval’s previous research documenting the oral histories of local Latino veterans who served in the Vietnam War.

This new project centers on the oral histories of these veterans that have been curated by Summers Sandoval. The oral histories will be presented as a staged performance read by some of the veterans themselves as individual historical monologues, also known as “testimonios” in Spanish.

“I feel honored to receive the support of the Whiting Foundation. It’s a humbling thing for me to be part of a cohort of such amazing and engaged scholars,” he says.

Summers Sandoval has worked on the topic of Latinos and the Vietnam War since 2011 and is currently working on a book that delves into the social history of the “brown baby boom” and how the war in Vietnam serves as a prism into the experiences of Latino veterans in the 20th-century U.S. “This project is based on that work, an opportunity for me to connect people to this history in an accessible way as well as a deeply personal one,” he says.

The project “Vietnam Veteranos” will also draw from the expertise and support of Rose Portillo ’75, lecturer in theatre and dance at Pomona (see story on page 42). As a collaborator on the project, Portillo will draw from her experience translating oral histories into theatrical monologues. She will also direct the production and oversee a team of professional actors to serve as coaches for the veterans.

The performance will be staged at Pomona College’s Seaver Theatre and an East Los Angeles-based venue in spring 2018. In addition, Summers Sandoval plans to produce a video and accompanying print and digital publication to be shared with a wider audience.

The topic of the Vietnam War is more than academic for Summers Sandoval, who also serves as chair of Pomona’s History Department.

“My father is a Vietnam veteran,” he says. “His brother, my uncle, are Vietnam veterans. Most of the males I knew growing up were also Vietnam veterans. This work is deeply personal for me. In many ways, it’s a way for me to bring my skills as a historian to better understand not only why Latinos made up such a significant share of the combat troops in Southeast Asia but, as important, how the war framed a long-term impact on their lives and the lives of their communities.

“At a moment when political leaders portray Latinos in the United States as criminals, and as economic and cultural threats, I hope work like mine can serve a purpose,” he adds. On one level, histories like these humanize Latinas and Latinos. It’s both troubling and sad that this is even a need in the 21st century, but it is. The humanities help us understand people within the context of their own complex lives, filled with hopes and desires as well as struggles and contradictions.

“I hope my work presents this generation in this way, as human beings seeking lives of dignity. Perhaps more importantly, Latinas and Latinos represent the future military personnel of the United States. Because of that, I think it’s vital for us all to recognize and better understand the enduring impacts of both military service and war.”

In the past five years, Summers Sandoval has collected more than 50 oral histories of Latino veterans of the Vietnam War and their families. Two years ago, he received a $10,000 grant from the Cal Humanities California Documentary Project for a youth-centered, community history project in partnership with The dA Center for the Arts in downtown Pomona, Calif. The project trained local youth and Pomona College students to conduct oral histories of local Latino veterans and their families.

A free exhibition of that earlier project, “Voices Veteranos: Mexican America and the Legacy of Vietnam 2017,” was to run from March 11 through April 15 at The dA Center for the Arts in downtown Pomona.

Professor Gary Smith Explains the Role of Chance in Everyday Life.

WHAT THE LUCK?

Why does your favorite team have an outstanding season and then struggle to replicate its previous success? You’ll look for all sorts of reasons, but it’s likely just a matter of chance.

According to Professor of Economics Gary Smith, we are hardwired to make sense of the world and underestimate the role of luck in our daily lives. In his new book, What the Luck? The Surprising Role of Chance in Our Everyday Lives, Smith argues that understanding the role of luck through the statistical concept of regression to the mean is the key to realizing that exceptional success is often transitory.

“Whenever there is uncertainty, there is regression. It happens in parenting, education, sports, medicine, business, investing and more. Don’t be misled by chance and surprised by regression,” says Smith.

Smith’s vision for the book began with an academic paper more than 20 years ago. He noticed that sports commentators tend to believe that outstanding performances will continue season after season. When they don’t, the commentators attribute the fall-off to laziness, a lack of focus or a sophomore slump. Along with Teddy Schall ’99, Smith showed that baseball performances regress, in that the top players in any season tend to do not as well the season before or the season after.

What the Luck? lies on two main pillars that explain why even the most skilled and talented will regress toward a norm or midpoint. For example, a student with the ability to average 80 percent on her tests, could score 90 percent on a “lucky” day or a 70 percent on an off day.

Second, of those students who do score 90, most were lucky and therefore won’t do as well on another test of the same material. They will regress. It is a mistake to conclude that the student with the highest score is the best student in the class, and it is a mistake to conclude that she didn’t study as hard when she gets a somewhat lower score on a second test.

According to Smith, the same principles can be applied to professional sports, medicine and investments. When a team wins a championship, we conclude that it is the best team and expect it to keep winning championships. When it does not repeat, we assume that it’s the team’s fault—when it may have been lucky to win in the first place. A doctor who sees a worrisome medical test result assumes the patient is sick and prescribes a treatment. When the patient improves, the doctor assumes that the treatment worked—when the patients may not have been ill in the first place. When a stock goes into the Dow Jones Industrial Average because it has been doing well, investors assume that it will keep doing well. When it doesn’t, investors attribute it to the Curse of the Dow, when the stock may have been lucky before it entered the Dow.

“If instead, we recognize that chance may play a role, we are less likely to overreact,” Smith says, “The champion is not necessarily the best team; the patient’s reading does not necessarily imply disease; and the companies entering the Dow are not necessarily the best investments.”

A prolific writer, Smith is the author of eight textbooks, three trade books, and 80 academic papers. His research interests are financial markets, especially the stock market, and the application of statistical analysis to finance and sports.

—Patricia Zurita

Author/Professor Jonathan Lethem Discusses his Writing Process.

HIGH-STAKES WRITING

Bestselling author Professor Jonathan Lethem’s new novel, A Gambler’s Anatomy, is the story of a James Bond-esque international backgammon hustler who believes he is psychic but is sideswiped by the discovery of a tumor in his face. He is then forced to grapple with existential questions, like: Are gamblers being played by life? What if you’re telepathic, but it doesn’t do you any good?

Which raises another question: Why did Lethem, a critically acclaimed novelist and essayist, choose to write about backgammon and gambling?

“I always lean forward when someone in a story or a movie goes to the casino or steps up to the pool table or goes to the online poker game. So, I began by thinking in the simplest way, ‘I want to do that. I want to write a gambling story,’” says Lethem.

Given the high stakes, gambling serves as a rich metaphor for life, he says. “The backgammon board or any kind of gambling arena is a kind of microcosmic world, it intensifies your relationship to life. But it’s also an escape; it’s a bubble you go into; it’s outside of life. While you’re there, everything else disappears,” he says.

And ultimately, life—the house—always wins, he says.

Lethem, whose nine previous books include Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude, is known for his genre mixing and experimentation. He says this book is a more deliberate engagement with genre, classifying A Gambler’s Anatomy as a horror novel, though it doesn’t have the traditional scares. Lethem says he wanted to write a book where the reader can’t take his or her eyes off of the character’s night­marish descent, which is set in Berlin, Singapore and Berkeley.

Lethem’s writing process starts with what he calls “blundering around” and moves to dogged intention. Once he finds a voice that he likes, he works every day. But he says he is not concerned with hours or pages, so as much as with touching the project consistently. When Lethem gets stopped at a crossroads, he says, he will just sit there “staring at the page and tolerating the anxiety.” While so many other writers toss out lots of material and create alternate scenes that don’t end up in their books, Lethem treads carefully. “I try not to put a foot wrong. People sometimes ask you afterwards for the outtakes, asking, ‘Could we publish the deleted scenes?’ And I say, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t really generate those.’ If I’m turning in the wrong direction and it doesn’t please me to write in that mode, I’d rather sit and wait,” he says.

Born into a creative family, as a child Lethem thought about becoming a painter like his father, or a filmmaker or cartoonist. But his mother gave him a typewriter, “which was like ‘Go,’” he says. By the age of 14, the voracious reader announced he wanted to be a writer. His enjoyment of the craft hasn’t dimmed.

“When you begin to break down all the variations that are possible and all the implications of the decisions you’re making at a preconscious level when you write sentences, even in that very basic mode, you can never stop being fascinated by it. I like trying to stay an apprentice to the task.”

Lethem, the College’s Roy E. Disney Professor of Creative Writing, says he finds conversations in the classroom stimulating. “Seeing people trying to enact what they’re dreaming up, what they want to get on the page—trying to close that distance between what you visualize or what you hope your reader will experience and what actually lands on the page—is a very rich and very mysterious area of instability,” Lethem says.

—Sneha Abraham

Professor Char Miller Looks Below the Surface of California’s Ecological History.

NOT-SO-GOLDEN HISTORY

Professor Char Miller’s new book, Not So Golden State: Sustainability vs. the California Dream, is a collection of essays that examine California’s complex and sometimes contentious relationship between nature and humans.

Inspired by his many travels across California’s varied landscapes, and with chapters like “PetroLA,” “Razed Expectations,” and “Strawberry Fields Forever” among others, Miller’s essays give the reader a look into the effects that local, state and federal policies (both good and bad) have had on the natural environment, the impact of recreation on national forests, parks, wildlife and nature refuges, and current efforts to restore what California has lost or is losing.

Covering everything from water politics to wild fires riverbeds and sage and chaparral, Miller nudges the reader to look at the Golden State through a different lens, and Miller hopes, inspire readers to look at, treat and integrate with nature in ways that are beneficial to both humans and the natural environment. In “Razed Expectations,” Miller excoriates the U.S. Army of Engineers for gutting the Sepulveda Basin and the ensuing devastation left on the terrain. In “Water Fights,” he looks at the current battle the city of Claremont is waging to gain local control over water and in “Lesson Learned,” Miller looks at the politicization of wild fires and the cautionary insights gained and soon forgotten from the 2009 Station Fire that burned 160,000 acres of the Angeles National Forest.

“I hope that people reading this start to think about our relationship to nature – and it to us. How do we protect natural habitats, animals, resources, from us?”

“The central argument of the book is that we have agency within the larger world but our actions must be consistent with systems we have to protect the natural environment. The book is an effort to give people a roadmap to act with a kind of grace.”

On field trips with students, and hikes and travels with his wife and on his own, Miller says he gets curious about why things are the way they are and looks to the past to find answers: “My writing is sparked by encounters with a particular place and time in nature that led to thinking about that space in the past.”

A prolific writer, Miller regularly publishes op-eds, blog entries and books on the West and its environmental history.

“Writing is a way of inscribing myself in the landscape and helps make the landscape comprehensible.”

Miller sees his latest book as the end to a trilogy, of sorts, of two earlier collections of essays that are framed by his own westward journey that started out in San Antonio, Texas and takes him through Arizona and ultimately to Claremont, California.

“With Deep in the Heart of San Antonio: Land and Life in South Texas, I am figuring out what’s going on, and On The Edge: Water, Immigration, and Politics in the Southwest is a transitional book that takes me from San Antonio to California. Not So Golden State centers on California but looks east and raises the question about a new world, of where we’re going.”

—Carla Guerrero ’06