Purpose: Reading has been proposed to be a protective factor in mental health; however, testing this is made challenging by the vulnerability of the reading-mental health association to confounding. Methods: We used two complementary approaches to address this: propensity score matching and random intercepts cross-lagged panel models (RI-CLPM) in a large longitudinal study: the Zurich Project on Social Development from Childhood to Adulthood (z-proso). For the counterfactual analyses, mental health outcomes of anxiety, depression, and psychosis-like symptoms were measured at ages 17 and 20 and reading engagement was measured at ages 15 and 17. Matching variables included a wide range of factors potentially related to reading and mental health outcomes. Results: There was no consistent effect of reading for pleasure on anxiety, depression, and psychosis. The only significant effects were detrimental effects of reading on anxiety and psychosis at age 20 when using non-bi-partite matching. Conclusion: Reading for pleasure without considering content and style of engagement may not be a protective factor in adolescent mental health.
What is difficult is not usually pleasurable. Yet, for certain unfamiliar figurative language, like that which is common in poetry, while comprehension is often more difficult than for more conventional language, it is in many cases more pleasurable. Concentrating our investigation on verb-based metaphors, we examined whether and to what degree the novel variations (in the form of verb changes and extensions) of conventional verb metaphors were both more difficult to comprehend and yet induced more pleasure. To test this relationship, we developed a set of 62 familiar metaphor stimuli, each with corresponding optimal and excessive verb variation and metaphor extension conditions, and normed these stimuli using both objective measures and participant subjective ratings. We then tested the pleasure-difficulty relationship with an online behavioral study. Based on Rachel Giora and her colleagues’ ‘optimal innovation hypothesis’, we anticipated an inverse U-shaped relationship between ease and pleasure, with an optimal degree of difficulty, introduced by metaphor variations, producing the highest degree of pleasure when compared to familiar or excessive conditions. Results, however, revealed a more complex picture, with only metaphor extension conditions (not verb variation conditions) producing the anticipated pleasure effects. Individual differences in semantic cognition and verbal reasoning assessed using the Semantic Similarities Test, while clearly influential, further complicated the pleasure-difficulty relationship, suggesting an important avenue for further investigation.
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