Abstract
Fiction reading experience affects emotion recognition abilities, yet the causal link remains underspecified. Current theory suggests fiction reading promotes the simulation of fictional minds, which supports emotion recognition skills. We examine the extent to which contextualized statistical experience with emotion category labels in language is associated with emotion recognition. Using corpus analyses, we demonstrate fiction texts reliably use emotion category labels in an emotive sense (e.g., cry of relief), whereas other genres often use alternative senses (e.g., hurricane relief fund). Furthermore, fiction texts were shown to be a particularly reliable source of information about complex emotions. The extent to which these patterns affect human emotion concepts was analyzed in two behavioral experiments. In experiment 1 (n = 134), experience with fiction text predicted recognition of emotions employed in an emotive sense in fiction texts. In experiment 2 (n = 387), fiction reading experience predicted emotion recognition abilities, overall. These results suggest that long-term language experience, and fiction reading, in particular, supports emotion concepts through exposure to these emotions in context.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Acheson, D. J., Wells, J. B., & MacDonald, M. C. (2008). New and updated tests of print exposure and reading abilities in college students. Behavior research methods, 40(1), 278–289. https://doi.org/10.3758/BRM.40.1.278.
Bal, P. M., Butterman, O. S., & Bakker, A. B. (2011). The influence of fictional narrative experience on work outcomes: a conceptual analysis and research model. Review of General Psychology, 15(4), 361–370. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0025416.
Bal, P. M., & Veltkamp, M. (2013). How does fiction reading influence empathy? An experimental investigation on the role of emotional transportation. PloS One, 8(1), e55341. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0055341.
Barrett, L. F. (2017). The theory of constructed emotion: an active inference account of interoception and categorization. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 12, 17–23 https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsx060.
Chen, S.-Y., & Fang, S.-P. (2015). Developing a Chinese version of an Author Recognition Test for college students in Taiwan. Journal of Research in Reading, 38(4), 344–360. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9817.12018.
Davies, M. (2008). The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): 560 million words, 1990-present. https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/
Djikic, M., Oatley, K., & Moldoveanu, M. C. (2013). Reading other minds: effects of literature on empathy. Scientific Study of Literature, 3(1), 28–47. https://doi.org/10.1075/ssol.3.1.06dji.
Dodell-Feder, D., & Tamir, D. I. (2018). Fiction reading has a small positive impact on social cognition: a meta-analysis. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 147(11), 1713–1727. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000395.
Doyle, C. M., & Lindquist, K. A. (2017). Language and emotion: hypotheses on the constructed nature of emotion perception. In J.-M. Fernández-Dols & J. A. Russell (Eds.), Oxford series in social cognition and social neuroscience. The science of facial expression (pp. 415–432). Oxford University Press.
Elfenbein, H. A., Beaupré, M., Lévesque, M., & Hess, U. (2007). Toward a dialect theory: cultural differences in the expression and recognition of posed facial expressions. Emotion, 7(1), 131–146. https://doi.org/10.1037/1528-3542.7.1.131.
Fong, K., Mullin, J. B., & Mar, R. A. (2013). What you read matters: the role of fiction genre in predicting interpersonal sensitivity. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 7(4), 370–376. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0034084.
Foster, E. D., & Deardorff, A. (2017). Open Science Framework (OSF). Journal of the Medical Library Association : JMLA, 105(2), 203–206. https://doi.org/10.5195/jmla.2017.88.
Gernsbacher, M. A., Hallada, B. M., & Robertson, R. R. W. (1998). How automatically do readers infer fictional characters’ emotional states? Scientific Studies of Reading: the Official Journal of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading, 2(3), 271–300. https://doi.org/10.1207/s1532799xssr0203_5.
Goodman, J. C., Dale, P. S., & Li, P. (2008). Does frequency count? Parental input and the acquisition of vocabulary. Journal of Child Language, 35(3), 515–531. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000907008641.
Halberstadt, J., Winkielman, P., Niedenthal, P. M., & Dalle, N. (2009). Emotional conception: how embodied emotion concepts guide perception and facial action. Psychological Science, 20(10), 1254–1261. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02432.x.
Halberstadt, J. B., & Niedenthal, P. M. (2001). Effects of emotion concepts on perceptual memory for emotional expressions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81(4), 587–598. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.81.4.587.
Hoffmann, H., Kessler, H., Eppel, T., Rukavina, S., & Traue, H. C. (2010). Expression intensity, gender and facial emotion recognition: women recognize only subtle facial emotions better than men. Acta Psychologica, 135(3), 278–283. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2010.07.012.
Jack, R. E., Garrod, O. G. B., Yu, H., Caldara, R., & Schyns, P. G. (2012). Facial expressions of emotion are not culturally universal. PNAS Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 109(19), 7241–7244. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1200155109.
Jackson, J. C., Watts, J., Henry, T. R., List, J. M., Forkel, R., Mucha, P. J., Greenhill, S. J., Gray, R. D., & Lindquist, K. A. (2019). Emotion semantics show both cultural variation and universal structure. Science, 366(6472), 1517–1522. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaw8160.
Johns, B. T., Gruenenfelder, T. M., Pisoni, D. B., & Jones, M. N. (2012). Effects of word frequency, contextual diversity, and semantic distinctiveness on spoken word recognition. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 132(2), EL74–EL80. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.4731641.
Johns, B. T., & Jamieson, R. K. (2018). A large-scale analysis of variance in written language. Cognitive Science, 42(4), 1360–1374. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12583.
Johns, B. T., & Jamieson, R. K. (2019). The influence of place and time on lexical behavior: A distributional analysis. Behavior research methods, 51(6), 2438–2453. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-019-01289-z.
Johnson, D. R. (2012). Transportation into a story increases empathy, prosocial behavior, and perceptual bias toward fearful expressions. Personality and Individual Differences, 52(2), 150–155. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2011.10.005.
Kavanagh, L., Niedenthal, P., & Winkielman, P. (2011). Embodied simulation as grounds for emotion concepts. In P. Wilson (Ed.), Lodz Studies in Language. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
Kidd, D., & Castano, E. (2017). Different stories: how levels of familiarity with literary and genre fiction relate to mentalizing. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 11(4), 474–486. https://doi.org/10.1037/aca0000069.
Kidd, D., Ongis, M., & Castano, E. (2016). On literary fiction and its effects on theory of mind. Scientific Study of Literature, 6(1), 42–58. https://doi.org/10.1075/ssol.6.1.04kid.
Kidd, D. C., & Castano, E. (2013). Reading literary fiction improves theory of mind. Science, 342(6156), 377–380. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1239918.
Kim, J. S., Elli, G. V., & Bedny, M. (2019). Knowledge of animal appearance among sighted and blind adults. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(23), 11213–11222. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1900952116.
Koopman, E. M. E. (2015). Empathic reactions after reading: the role of genre, personal factors and affective responses. Poetics, 50, 62–79. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2015.02.008.
Koopman, E. M. E. (2016). Effects of “literariness” on emotions and on empathy and reflection after reading. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 10(1), 82–98. https://doi.org/10.1037/aca0000041.
Lee, H., Seong, E., Choi, W., & Lowder, M. W. (2019). Development and assessment of the Korean Author Recognition Test. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 72(7), 1837–1846. https://doi.org/10.1177/1747021818814461.
Lewis, M., Zettersten, M., & Lupyan, G. (2019). Distributional semantics as a source of visual knowledge. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(39), 19237–19238. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1910148116.
Lindquist, K. A., & Gendron, M. (2013). What’s in a word? Language constructs emotion perception. Emotion Review, 5, 66–71. http://dx.doi .org/https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073912451351
Lindquist, K. A., Gendron, M., Barrett, L. F., & Dickerson, B. C. (2014). Emotion perception, but not affect perception, is impaired with semantic memory loss. Emotion, 14(2), 375–387. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0035293.
Lindquist, K. A., MacCormack, J. K., & Shablack, H. (2015). The role of language in emotion: predictions from psychological constructionism. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, Article 444. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00444.
Lupyan, G., Rakison, D. H., & McClelland, J. L. (2007). Language is not just for talking: redundant labels facilitate learning of novel categories. Psychological Science, 18(12), 1077–1083. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.02028.x.
Mar, R. A., & Oatley, K. (2008). The function of fiction is the abstraction and simulation of social experience. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3(3), 173–192. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-6924.2008.00073.x.
Mar, R. A., Oatley, K., Hirsh, J., dela Paz, J., & Peterson, J. B. (2006). Bookworms versus nerds: exposure to fiction versus non-fiction, divergent associations with social ability, and the simulation of fictional social worlds. Journal of Research in Personality, 40(5), 694–712. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2005.08.002.
Mar, R. A., Oatley, K., & Peterson, J. B. (2009). Exploring the link between reading fiction and empathy: ruling out individual differences and examining outcomes. Communications, 34(4), 407–428. https://doi.org/10.1515/COMM.2009.025.
Masterson, J., & Hayes, M. (2007). Development and data for UK versions of an author and title recognition test for adults. Journal of Research in Reading, 30(2), 212–219. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9817.2006.00320.x.
Montag, J. L., & MacDonald, M. C. (2015). Text exposure predicts spoken production of complex sentences in 8- and 12-year-old children and adults. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 144(2), 447–468. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000054.
Mumper, M. L., & Gerrig, R. J. (2017). Leisure reading and social cognition: a meta-analysis. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 11(1), 109–120. https://doi.org/10.1037/aca0000089.
Niedenthal, P. M. (2007). Embodying emotion. Science, 316(5827), 1002–1005. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1136930.
Panero, M. E., Weisberg, D. S., Black, J., Goldstein, T. R., Barnes, J. L., Brownell, H., & Winner, E. (2016). Does reading a single passage of literary fiction really improve theory of mind? An attempt at replication. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 111(5), e46–e54. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000064.
Pino, M. C., & Mazza, M. (2016). The use of “literary fiction” to promote mentalizing ability. PloS one, 11(8), e0160254.
Samur, D., Tops, M., & Koole, S. L. (2018). Does a single session of reading literary fiction prime enhanced mentalising performance? Four replication experiments of Kidd and Castano (2013). Cognition and Emotion, 32(1), 130–144. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2017.1279591.
Schlegel, K., & Scherer, K. R. (2016). Introducing a short version of the Geneva Emotion Recognition Test (GERT-S): psychometric properties and construct validation. Behavior Research Methods, 48(4), 1383–1392. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-015-0646-4.
Summers, K. (2013). Adult reading habits and preferences in relation to gender differences. Reference & User Services Quarterly, 52(3), 243–249.
Thompson, A. E., & Voyer, D. (2014). Sex differences in the ability to recognise non-verbal displays of emotion: a meta-analysis. Cognition and Emotion, 28(7), 1164–1195. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2013.875889.
Trauffer, N. M., Widen, S. C., & Russell, J. A. (2013). Education and the attribution of emotion to facial expressions. Psychological Topics, 22(2), 237–247.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
Steven C. Schwering designed and conducted corpus analyses, conducted analyses for experiments 1 and 2, and prepared the manuscript; Natalie M. Ghaffari-Nikou designed experiment 1, collected data for experiment 1, and coded corpus data; Fangyun Zhao collected data for experiment 2; Paula M. Niedenthal and Maryellen MacDonald designed corpus analyses and experiments; all authors contributed to editing the manuscript.
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Acknowledgements
Ethan Seidenberg and Dasha Yermol coded corpus analyses.
Funding Information
This research was funded by NSF grant #1849236, Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) awards, and the Menzies and Royalty Research Award at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Data Availability
All data and analyses are available on the Open Science Foundation (https://osf.io/79tmf/files/).
Code Availability
Not applicable
Conflict of Interest
The authors declare no competing interests.
Ethical Approval
This experiment and the following experiment were approved by the University of Wisconsin-Madison I.R.B. and all participants gave their informed consent prior to participation.
Additional information
Handling editor: Kristen Lindquist
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Schwering, S.C., Ghaffari-Nikou, N.M., Zhao, F. et al. Exploring the Relationship Between Fiction Reading and Emotion Recognition. Affec Sci 2, 178–186 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42761-021-00034-0
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42761-021-00034-0