Reading Literary Fiction improves people's ability to recognize other people's mental states

Your ability to tell how others are feeling can be influenced by how much you read and what you are reading. Reading fictional literature can help you with identifying people’s emotions, while reading non-fiction and popular fiction pieces do not help you with identifying emotions. Participants in a study were assigned to read "highbrow" books achieved better scores on a test that took black and with pictures of actors eyes and then had you assign an emotion to them. This is one of the first times that scientists have done a study on the short-term influence of different types of literature on people’s social skills.

            Why does this happen you might ask, well the researchers say that this is due to the tendency for popular fiction to focus around plot while literary fiction focuses around character development and their deep emotions. We develop the real life skills of being able to read emotions by practicing on fake minds while reading. You become more capable of being able to pick up on the small changes in someone’s feelings and emotions. Reading a book and watching characters develop throughout the book can give you the experience you need to get more experienced in social situations. Reading literature that has depth to characters and has characters that change throughout the course of the book can not only be extremely beneficial but can also be fun.
           I personally believe that this study is very interesting but makes sense in a way, you can gain experience in these make believe situations so when you are in a real situation that is similar you have an idea what is going on. This means that reading gained a new purpose, we benefit from the way that we observe and process people’s mental states.