Imaginary Engagement, Real-World Effects: Fiction, Emotion, and Social Cognition

Abstract

Prior research has shown that cumulative written fiction exposure is correlated with ( Mar, Oatley, Hirsch, de la Paz, & Peterson, 2006 ; Mar, Oatley, & Peterson, 2009 ) and 1-time exposure to literary fiction increases (e.g., Black & Barnes, 2015a ; Kidd & Castano, 2013 ) performance on an emotion-reading task. However, Panero and colleagues (2016) found that although lifetime fiction exposure is a reliable predictor of performance, the causal effects previously observed may be more fragile (see also Samur, Tops, & Koole, 2017 ). The current article is an exploration of the extent to which the ability of fiction to affect social cognition may depend not only on what is read, but also how one reads. Specifically, an argument is made that the effect of fiction on social cognition may depend on the degree to which the reader contributes imaginatively to the text and that, although drawing meaning from literary fiction may require high levels of imaginative engagement, popular and genre fiction may allow for engaging in this way. This stance is discussed with respect to the role that emotional investment in a story and its characters might play in influencing readers of popular fiction to read in a “literary” way.

Challenging Empathic Deficit Models of Autism Through Responses to Serious Literature

“…While some readers may remain on the surface of serious literature, struggling to get within it, those who experience what Limburg ( 2021 ) calls undifferentiation show the true advantages of literary reading (Barnes, 2018 ; Davis, 2020 ; Davis and Magee, 2020 ). During this process, it is argued that moving parts of a passage become part of the reader, while simultaneously remaining part of the text and the author who wrote it, all at the same time (Barnes, 2018 ). In this way, it becomes necessary for readers to re-write serious literature in the act of reading (Barthes, 1969, as cited by Muldoon, 2021 ).…”

Psychology of Narrative Art

“…Kidd and Castano argued that as such effects occur, they emerge from concentration on characters in their complexity. It is not that people do not think about characters in popular fiction; as Barnes (2018) showed (in this special issue), people often have intense parasocial relationships with popular characters about whom they think a lot. The important principle is that in literary fiction, compared with stories in which a protagonist enacts a single role, for instance as hero or lover, or functions mainly to move a plot forward, people are invited to think of what Forster (1927) called round characters, who have aspects that are not simple and do not necessarily fit easily together.…”

To Teach and Delight: The Varieties of Learning From Fiction

“…Several investigations have shown that greater exposure to fiction is associated with higher performance on mentalizing tasks (Barnes, 2018; D. C. Kidd & Castano, 2013;Mar, 2018;Mar et al, 2006;Mumper & Gerrig, 2017). Moreover, the effects of exposure to fiction are not simply correlational (Dodell-Feder & Tamir, 2018; D. C. Kidd & Castano, 2013).…”