Reading literary (but not pop) fiction, boosts our understanding of other people's minds

Literary fiction takes the reader on a journey into other worlds, other lives, other minds. A new study shows that this has an immediate effect on the reader's powers of empathy, as judged by simple lab tests. The same benefit was not found for popular fiction. "Readers of literary fiction must draw on more flexible interpretative resources to infer the feelings and thoughts of characters," said the researchers David Kidd and Emanuele Castano at the New School for Social Research. "That is, they must engage Theory of Mind processes [ToM refers to our ability to represent and understand other people's thoughts and feelings]." Across five experiments, involving hundreds of volunteers online, the researchers showed that reading a few pages of literary fiction (including works by Don DeLillo, Lydia Davis, Louise Erdrich, Alice Munroe and Dagoberto Gilb) boosted participants' immediate ability to discern people's emotions from pictures of their eyes or faces. In some cases, the benefit extended to superior performance on a Theory of Mind picture test that involved using visual or verbal cues to identify what a person was thinking or desiring. No such effects were found after reading non-fiction or pop fiction, including passages from Danielle Steele, Rosamunde Pilcher and Gillian Flynn. The apparent benefits of reading literary fiction held even after controlling for a raft of other variables, including participants' education, gender, age and mood...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: Source Type: blogs