[kennyc]

Want To Read Others' Thoughts? Try Reading Literary Fiction
by NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE
October 04, 2013 4:24 PM

Would time spent with Anton Chekov, famed for his subtle, flawed characters, make you a better judge of human nature?
Would time spent with Anton Chekov, famed for his subtle, flawed characters, make you a better judge of human nature?

Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Your ability to "read" the thoughts and feelings of others could be affected by the kind of fiction you read.

That's the conclusion of a study in the journal Science that gave tests of social perception to people who were randomly assigned to read excerpts from literary fiction, popular fiction or nonfiction.

On average, people who read parts of more literary books like The Round House by Louise Erdrich did better on those tests than people who read either nothing, read nonfiction or read best-selling popular thrillers like The Sins of the Mother by Danielle Steel.

For example, folks who were assigned to read highbrow literary works did better on a test called "Reading the Mind in the Eyes," which required them to look at black-and-white photographs of actors' eyes and decide what emotion the actors were expressing.

This is the first time scientists have demonstrated the short-term effects of reading on people's social abilities, says Raymond Mar, a psychology researcher at York University in Toronto. He has investigated the effects of reading in the past but did not work on this study.

"I think it's a really interesting paper," says Mar. "It seems to be largely consistent with this growing body of work showing that what we read and our exposure to narrative has a very interesting impact on our social abilities and our ability to understand what other people are thinking and feeling."
....

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013...terary-fiction

and

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/1...ekhov/?hp&_r=0