{"id":281,"date":"2013-10-03T21:45:54","date_gmt":"2013-10-03T20:45:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jesusromerotrillo.es\/?p=281"},"modified":"2013-10-03T21:45:54","modified_gmt":"2013-10-03T20:45:54","slug":"i-know-how-youre-feeling-i-read-chekhov","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jesusromerotrillo.es\/?p=281","title":{"rendered":"I Know How You\u2019re Feeling, I Read Chekhov"},"content":{"rendered":"<header>By\u00a0<a title=\"See all posts by PAM BELLUCK\" href=\"http:\/\/well.blogs.nytimes.com\/author\/pam-belluck\/\">PAM BELLUCK<\/a><\/p>\n<\/header>\n<div>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" id=\"100000002480693\" alt=\"Emanuele Castano and David Comer Kidd worked on a study that found that reading literary fiction leads to better performance on tests of social perception.\" src=\"http:\/\/graphics8.nytimes.com\/images\/2013\/10\/04\/science\/04literature\/04literature-articleInline.jpg\" width=\"190\" height=\"285\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Casey Kelbaugh for The New York TimesEmanuele Castano and David Comer Kidd worked on a study that found that reading literary fiction leads to better performance on tests of social perception.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Reading Chekhov for a few minutes makes you better at decoding what other people are feeling. But spending the same amount of time with a potboiler by Danielle Steel does not have the same effect, scientists reported Thursday.<\/p>\n<p>A striking new study found that reading literary fiction \u2013 as opposed to popular fiction or serious nonfiction \u2013 leads people to perform better on tests that measure empathy, social perception and emotional intelligence.<\/p>\n<div>\n<div>\n<h5><a href=\"http:\/\/well.blogs.nytimes.com\/?p=96430\">The 5-Minute Empathy Workout<\/a><\/h5>\n<p><img alt=\"DESCRIPTION\" src=\"http:\/\/graphics8.nytimes.com\/images\/2013\/10\/03\/health\/03well_eyes\/03well_eyes-thumbStandard.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Curious to see how you do on a test of emotional perception?<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/well.blogs.nytimes.com\/?p=96430\">Take our quiz.<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<p>The authors of\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.sciencemag.org\/content\/early\/2013\/10\/02\/science.1239918.abstract\">the study<\/a>, published by the journal Science, say that literary fiction often leaves more to the imagination, encouraging readers to make inferences about characters and be sensitive to emotional nuance and complexity. They theorize that reading literary fiction helps improve real-life skills like empathy and understanding the beliefs and intentions of others.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>They and other academic psychologists say such findings should be considered by educators designing student curriculums, particularly the Common Core standards, adopted by most states, which increase the amount of nonfiction students are assigned.<\/p>\n<p>In the study, a series of five experiments conducted by social psychologists at The New School for Social Research in New York City, people who read excerpts from literary fiction (Don DeLillo, Alice Munro, Wendell Berry) scored better than people who read popular fiction (Gillian Flynn, Rosamunde Pilcher, Mary Roberts Rinehart) on\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/newschool.co1.qualtrics.com\/SE\/?SID=SV_a5YQPL3e9aEbu5u\">tests asking them to infer what people were thinking or feeling<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 a field that scientists call \u201cTheory of Mind.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>People who read literary fiction also scored better than people who read nonfiction (in this case, pieces published in Smithsonian Magazine, like \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.smithsonianmag.com\/history-archaeology\/How-the-Potato-Changed-the-World.html\">How the Potato Changed the World<\/a>\u201d). Interestingly, when subjects were asked, they said they did not enjoy literary fiction as much as popular fiction.<\/p>\n<p>And in two experiments, some participants read nothing at all before taking the tests, yet performed as well as the participants who read popular fiction. Both of those groups made more mistakes on the tests than literary fiction readers, reported the researchers, Emanuele Castano, a psychology professor, and David Comer Kidd, a doctoral candidate.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s a really important result,\u201d said Nicholas Humphrey, an evolutionary psychologist who has written extensively about human intelligence, and who was not involved in the research. \u201cThat they would have subjects read for three to five minutes and that they would get these results is astonishing.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Dr. Humphrey, an emeritus professor at Darwin College, Cambridge, said, \u201cI would have thought reading in general\u201d would make people more empathetic and understanding. \u201cBut to separate off literary fiction, and to demonstrate that it has different effects from the other forms of reading is remarkable. I think it\u2019s going to generate a lot more research and I hope it\u2019s going to generate some discussion in education.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>To find a broader pool of research subjects than the college students who typically participate, the researchers used Amazon.com\u2019s Mechanical Turk service, where people sign up to earn money for completing small jobs. Between 78 and 456 people, ranging in age from 18 to 75, were recruited for each experiment and paid $2 or $3 each.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cTheory of Mind\u201d is a relatively new field.\u00a0<a title=\"Well quiz. \" href=\"http:\/\/well.blogs.nytimes.com\/2013\/10\/03\/well-quiz-the-mind-behind-the-eyes\/\">Tests measure people\u2019s ability to decode emotions shown in photographs of people\u2019s faces<\/a>\u00a0(irritation, fear, sadness) or to predict a person\u2019s expectations or beliefs in a particular scenario. The tests have been used in efforts to gauge empathy in children with autism, for example, or to zero in on which areas of the brain are used when people think about things from the perspective of others.<\/p>\n<p>Experts who have studied the correlation between reading and \u201cTheory of Mind\u201d say the new study is consistent with some previous research, but is more powerful because it suggests a direct effect \u2013 quantifiable by measuring how many right and wrong answers people got \u2013 of reading literature for only a few minutes. It suggests that people can be \u201cprimed\u201d for social skills like empathy, just as, say, watching a clip from a sad movie can make one feel more emotional.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis really nails down the causal direction,\u201d said Keith Oatley, a professor emeritus of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto who was not involved in the study. \u201cThese people have done not one experiment but five and they have found the same effects.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>There is much that the study does not address: How long lasting could such effects be? Would three months of reading Dickens and Austen produce effects that are larger, smaller or have no effect? Are the differences in scores all attributable to the type of fiction? Would the results hold if the same person read all the different types of material? And would it matter if the literary fiction was particularly difficult? The researchers did not use James Joyce\u2019s \u201cUlysses\u201d or Thomas Pynchon\u2019s \u201cGravity\u2019s Rainbow.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Raymond Mar, an associate professor of psychology at York University in Canada who did not work on the new research, said another study by one of his graduate students found that lifetime exposure to romance fiction resulted in the best scores on one of the empathy tests, compared with other genres. But he said that did not necessarily disprove the new study\u2019s results because it showed only a correlation and not a causal connection.<\/p>\n<p>Albert Wendland, director of a master\u2019s program in writing popular fiction at Seton Hill University, said, \u201cFrankly, I agree with the study.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Dr. Wendland said that \u201creading sensitive and lengthy explorations of people\u2019s lives, that kind of fiction is literally putting yourself into another person\u2019s position.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cLives that could be more difficult, more complex, more than what you might be used to in popular fiction, it makes sense that they will find that, yeah, that can lead to more empathy and understanding of other lives,\u201d he said. \u201cPopular fiction is a way of dealing more with one\u2019s own self maybe, with one\u2019s own wants, desires, needs.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>David Kidd, one of the authors of the study, said that \u201cin popular fiction, really the author is in control and the reader has a more passive role.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In literary fiction \u2013 Dostoyevsky, for example \u2013 \u201cthere is no single overarching authorial voice,\u201d he said. \u201cInstead, each character presents a different version of reality and they aren\u2019t necessarily reliable. You have to participate as a reader in this dialectic, which is really something you have to do in real life.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Dr. Castano, a study author, added that in many cases, \u201cpopular fiction seems to be more focused on the plot. Characters can be interchangeable and usually more stereotypical in the way they are described. The plot is what\u2019s interesting.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Louise Erdrich, whose short story, \u201cThe Round House,\u201d was used in one of the experiments, said she was heartened to hear of the study.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis is why I love science,\u201d she wrote in an e-mail. \u201cKidd and Castano found a way to prove true the intangible benefits of literary fiction. Also, I feel personally cheered. Writers are often lonely obsessives, especially the literary ones. It\u2019s nice to be told what we write is of social value. (However, I would still write even if novels were useless.)\u201d<\/p>\n<p>But while the findings brought Ms. Erdrich a measure of relief, she also suggested that the direct intertwining of science and art can only be taken so far.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThank God the research didn\u2019t find that novels increased tooth decay or blocked up your arteries,\u201d Ms. Erdrich said. \u201cYou never know.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By\u00a0PAM BELLUCK Casey Kelbaugh for The New York TimesEmanuele Castano and David Comer Kidd worked on a study that found that reading literary fiction leads to better performance on tests of social perception.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":225,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2,13,8],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesusromerotrillo.es\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesusromerotrillo.es\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesusromerotrillo.es\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesusromerotrillo.es\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesusromerotrillo.es\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=281"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesusromerotrillo.es\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesusromerotrillo.es\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/225"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesusromerotrillo.es\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesusromerotrillo.es\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesusromerotrillo.es\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}