Emotions are central to the experience of literary narrative fiction. Affect and mood can influence what book people choose, based partly on whether their goal is to change or maintain their current emotional state. Once having chosen a book, the narrative itself acts to evoke and transform emotions, both directly through the events and characters depicted and through the cueing of emotionally valenced memories. Once evoked by the story, these emotions can in turn influence a person's experience of the narrative. Lastly, emotions experienced during reading may have consequences after closing the covers of a book. This article reviews the current state of empirical research for each of these stages, providing a snapshot of what is known about the interaction between emotions and literary narrative fiction. With this, we can begin to sketch the outlines of what remains to be discovered.

Previous studies have found a positive relationship between exposure to fiction and interpersonal sensitivity. However, it is unclear whether exposure to different genres of fiction may be differentially related to these outcomes for readers. The current study investigated the role of four fiction genres (i.e., Domestic Fiction, Romance, Science-Fiction/Fantasy, and Suspense/Thriller) in the relationship between fiction and interpersonal sensitivity, controlling for other individual differences. Participants completed a survey that included a lifetime print-exposure measure along with an interpersonal sensitivity task. Some, but not all, fiction genres were related to higher scores on our measure of interpersonal sensitivity. Furthermore, after controlling for personality, gender, age, English fluency, and exposure to nonfiction, only the Romance and Suspense/Thriller genres remained significant predictors of interpersonal sensitivity. The findings of this study demonstrate that in discussing the influence of fiction print-exposure on readers it is important to consider the genre of the literature being consumed.

Although past research has explored the association between media of many forms (e.g., TV, music, advertising) and sexual socialization, books are 1 form of media that has largely been ignored with respect to this topic. The current study examined the relationship between lifetime exposure to different genres of text and sexual attitudes, including gender role stereotyping and sexual conservatism. We examined both broad categories of books (i.e., fiction vs. nonfiction) along with 4 separate fiction genres (domestic, romance, science-fiction/fantasy, and suspense/thriller). Participants completed a survey that included measures of lifetime exposure to text, gender role egalitarianism, gender role stereotyping, and sexual conservatism. Greater exposure to fiction, but not nonfiction, was related to increased gender role egalitarianism and reduced gender role stereotyping. No strong associations between the individual genres and the measures of sexual attitudes were observed. These results contribute to the growing body of evidence that reading literary fiction is associated with a wide variety of positive social outcomes.

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