Reading Feelings: Does Reading Fiction Improve Children's Empathy and Pro-social skills?

The ability to empathise with others - to share, understand, and experience concern for other people's emotional experiences - is arguably one of the most important skills in a cohesive society. It provides the underpinnings for prosocial behaviour and can also help in the promotion of social justice. Recent research has shown that, in adults, empathy can be influenced by one important activity: reading fiction. However, few studies have focused on reading and empathy in childhood, which will be the focus of the proposed programme of work.

In adult populations, there has been substantial interest in the benefits of reading fiction and, in particular literary fiction, in increasing empathy. Recent studies have shown that adults who are avid readers of literary fiction (but not other genres) perform better on tests of empathy. The effects of short-term interventions are more controversial, but most studies show small but reliable increases in empathy. These experimental studies suggest that reading fiction is causally related to empathic response, and some authors suggest that immersion in literature can have long-lasting effects on how readers think about themselves and how they respond to others (i.e., their prosocial behaviour). Comparable studies have not been conducted with children. Our aim is to use both longitudinal and experimental (training) studies to evaluate the effects of reading fiction on empathy in childhood.

Empathy is considered to have three components: emotional/affective empathy, where a person resonates with someone else's feelings; cognitive empathy or perspective taking, where a person applies reason to work out how someone else feels; and prosocial motivation (sometimes identified with 'intention to comfort'). A further issue is whether the motivation or intention leads to action (prosocial behaviour). These three aspects of empathy are empirically separable, but they are not always clearly differentiated in the literature. Thus, a novel contribution of the proposed work is to consider the three aspects of empathy, and the relation of each to reading. Another question we will address is how cognitive empathy is related to theory of mind.

We will also explore another factor known to influence empathic response to text in adults: the reader's ability to become engaged with, or transported by, text: termed transportability. Fiction, in particular, requires readers to actively engage whilst reading and to become absorbed in the text. A greater tendency to become transported can help the reader experience the emotions and perspective of the characters more intensely. Transportability, and its relation to reading experience and empathy, has not been explored in children. We propose to measure children's propensity to become transported into a narrative when reading, and to explore how this propensity influences the relation between reading and empathic response.

Another novel aspect of the current proposal is our plan to explore causal relations in the reverse direction: from empathy to reading comprehension. It has been suggested that increased empathy leads to better understanding of characters' mental states and (perhaps through increased amount of and enjoyment of reading) can improve reading comprehension. This hypothesis is largely unexplored, but we will address it in our longitudinal study.

The proposed research has substantial potential for impact. Recently in the UK there has been increased interest in the relation between reading and empathy in children. The not-for-profit organisation, EmpathyLab, is attracting considerable attention for its work with authors and publishers, using books and stories in schools as a vehicle for fostering empathy and positive social relationships. Our links with EmpathyLab will provide opportunities to disseminate our findings (at their annual Empathy Day events), and also to translate findings from the grant into impacts in schools.