Emily Troscianko

My current research builds on my background in cognitive literary studies to investigate the connections between narrative reading and eating disorders. I triangulate amongst a range of empirical methods, which have so far included a large-scale survey study, experiments involving reading full texts in their entirety, and computational analysis of social media data. The most striking result so far is that reading fiction specifically about eating disorders is typically perceived as harmful by people with an eating disorder, while reading other fiction is perceived as neutral or positive. This work has developed out of my longer-standing interests in how readers respond to fiction as well as what makes text seem realistic. My doctorate and my first monograph, Kafka’s Cognitive Realism (2014), explored Kafka’s works in terms of their "cognitive realism" in the realms of perception and emotion, applying cognitive-scientific findings and theories directly to the analysis of textual features and readers’ potential interactions with them. In this context I became especially interested in "second-generation" cognitive science, which takes seriously the embodied, enactive, embedded, and extended nature of the mind—factors which are crucial to understanding eating disorders as well as literary responses.

Troscianko, E., & Leon, M. (2026). Can methods that focus on eating behaviour and individual agency improve success rates in eating disorder recovery? Journal of Eating Disorders, 14(1), 59. Leon, M., Troscianko, E. T., & Woo, C. C. (2024). Inflammation and olfactory loss are associated with at least 139 medical conditions. Frontiers in Molecular Neuroscience, 17, 1455418. Troscianko, E. T., Riestra-Camacho, R., & Carney, J. (2024). Ethics-testing an eating disorder recovery memoir: A pre-publication experiment. Journal of Eating Disorders, 12(1), 114. Riestra-Camacho, R., Carney, J., & Troscianko, E. (2023). Can narrative bibliotherapy reduce vulnerability to eating disorders? Evidence from a reading experiment. Empirical Studies of the Arts. Online first Sep 2023.