More evidence that literary, but not pop, fiction boosts readers ’ emotional skills

Image via Flickr/VisitBritain By Christian Jarrett Three years ago, a pair of psychologists at the New School for Social Research in New York attracted worldwide interest and controversy when they reported in the prestigious journal Science that reading just a few pages of literary fiction boosted research participants’ recognition of other people’s emotions, but that reading pop fiction (also known as genre fiction) did not. Now the same researchers have returned with a new paper in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts that’s used a different approach to arrive at the same conclusion – again, reading literary fiction, but not genre fiction, appears to be associated with superior emotion recognition skills. The research from 2013 involved online participants reading a few pages of literary fiction (including excerpts from novels by Don DeLillo, Lydia Davis or Louise Erdrich) or pop fiction (including excerpts from Danielle Steele, Rosamunde Pilcher and Gillian Flynn) and then attempting to discern people’s emotions from looking at their eyes. One of that study’s critics was Mark Liberman. On his influential Language Log blog he expressed surprise that the study had even been accepted for publication – after all, he argued, the researchers had hand-picked just a few seemingly arbitrary examples of literary and genre fiction. It was, he said, a “breath-taking overgeneralisation” to extrapolate from the effects of ...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Educational Reading Social Source Type: blogs