The effect of reading on a person’s morality has been a topic of debate for decades, with people raising arguments that it either helps or hinders moral development. Two competing theories argue that fiction either promotes morality by increasing empathy (i.e., fiction as moral laboratory), or that exposure to fiction that portrays deviations from real-world morality increases acceptance of “immoral” things (i.e., moral boundary erosion). To better understand which of the two theories is most likely true, Black and Barnes (2021) investigated the relationship between literature consumption (i ..read more

With the growing popularity of video games, developers bear a heavier responsibility to ensure that their games do not foster toxicity and unsupportive behaviour among players. Johnson and colleagues (2021) decided to investigate when helping behaviour was more likely to occur in video games. In order to do so, they examined two kinds of passion people can have for a hobby: harmonious and obsessive passion. Harmoniously passionate people describe their hobby positively and can engage in it without the risk of negative consequences. In contrast, obsessively passionate people show the same enth ..read more

Mental health is a pressing concern for university students, with increasing numbers of students seeking mental health services in recent years. Dr. Shelby Levine and colleagues (2020) investigated whether recreational reading could improve the mental health of students by helping them fulfill core psychological needs. They hypothesized that recreational reading could decrease feelings of isolation and low competence, and serve as a form of resistance against restrictive academic environments. At the beginning of the academic year, 201 college students reported their psychological distress, r ..read more

Although a great deal of research has examined whether stories help to promote social cognition, most of this work has been on adults and not delved much into different types of stories. Hannah N. M. De Mulder and colleagues (2022) took it upon themselves to examine this question in adolescents, with a focus on comparing different modalities of presentation (i.e., books, television, film), and hedonic narratives to eudaimonic ones. Eudaimonic narratives prompt audiences to consider deep truths about the world, conveying a sense of meaning and often eliciting experiences of “being moved” by th ..read more

Over the years the writers of articles for OnFiction have argued that short stories and novels, as well as plays, films, and nowadays some video games, offer us insights into the minds of others and into the nature of human interactions.  A parallel set of arguments has been offered in our understanding of human health and illness. Among the foremost contributors here has been Ad Kaptain, a medical psychologist at Leiden University Medical Centre in Belgium. Some of his articles are listed below.   Among Kaptein’s interests is in how people experience being ill. One of his ideas i ..read more

Humans spend vast amounts of time engaging with fictional stories. There are four main theories that help to explain this love for fiction. First, fiction contains social and psychological experiences of the characters, which helps us gain a better understanding of our own world (Mar & Oatley, 2008). Second, humans are drawn to gossip, which is essentially what fiction is. Fiction gives us a window into the social relationships of the characters. Third, humans are drawn to the moral content of fiction. People enjoy rooting for the good guys, but also enjoy stories about morally ambiguous ..read more

Theory of Mind, or mentalizing, is an aspect of cognitive empathy that refers to the ability to understand that others have mental states and perspectives that may be different from one’s own. Previous research has established a link between reading fiction and empathy (e.g., Fong et al., 2013). Exposure to fiction versus non-fiction is associated with higher scores on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes task (RMET; Baron-Cohen et al., 2001), an ability task measuring Theory of Mind (Mar et al., 2006). A recent study by Tabullo and colleagues (2018) explored this relationship further. In a cros ..read more

  It’s hard to think of a more appropriate novel for OnFiction than The Reading List by Sara Nisha Adams. It’s about how readers can enter the hearts of novels, and novels can enter the hearts of readers. One protagonist is Mukesh, an elderly, grief-stricken man whose wife, Naina, has recently died of cancer. A second is the disgruntled seventeen-year-old Aleisha, who has taken a summer job at the Harrow Road Library. This place is where near where both of them live, a bit beyond the North Circular Road in London, near Wembley Football Stadium.   The book starts with a pr ..read more

On Wednesday, just before midnight. Angela, a night nurse in a hospice, came to see Phillipa, who had cancer.  After they’d talked a bit, Angela said, “Here, let me tuck you in. Comfortable?”   Late next evening, Thursday, again a little before midnight, Angela came and saw that Philippa was still awake. She pulled a chair beside the bed and sat down to chat. “What do you think it’s like, on the other side?” asked Philippa. “I did a lot of wondering about that, too.” “Good if it’s peaceful, calm.” “Yes.” “I think I was OK as a mother, not so good as a wife” “I read, recently ..read more

The idea of “schema” was central to Frederic Bartlett’s book of 1932, Remembering, where he described a series of experiments in which people were asked to read a story, or to look at a picture, and then reproduce it either immediately or later. Bartlett’s proposal was that remembering is an activity based not on anything like a photograph or recording, but on an understanding—schema—of how, in a way that is familiar to a person and within a society, one does certain kinds of actions like getting onto a train, or sitting down with others for a meal, plus an emotional attitude togeth ..read more