MONDAY, JULY 25, 2011 Research Bulletin: You Are What You Read

We are frequently warned to be cautious of our diet with the phrase you are what you eat. Well, is it also possible that you are what you read? Would reading about a person who is more intelligent, more worldly, and more debonair help to transfer these qualities to yourself? A fascinating study by Markus Appel (University of Linz) has demonstrated that reading about a character who has certain traits can prime or activate these same traits in our own self. Dr. Appel asked individuals to read a short movie script that described a couple days in the life of an ignorant, drunken, soccer hooligan. A second group of individuals read a script of similar length, but with more typical content that never referenced the intelligence of the characters (the control script). Both groups were then asked to complete a test of general knowledge (e.g., What is the capital city of Libya?). Those who read the control script got around 36% of the questions correct. In contrast, those who read about the soccer hooligan got around 30% correct. In other words, reading about an unintelligent story character with poor memory activated this quality in the minds of reader, resulting in poorer performance on this test. Keith Oatley has been known to caution that one should choose ones books as carefully as one chooses ones friends; it appears there may be some real truth to this advice!

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Research Bulletin: Fiction and Helping

We at OnFiction have talked quite a bit about how reading fiction might help to foster empathy. The mental processes used to understand a story character, to take that characters perspective and see the world through his or her eyes, seem similar to what we use to understand our real-world peers. More than just understanding others, fiction seems exceptionally well-suited to foster an empathic response, given its often emotional context. Our previous work has examined this hypothesis from various research perspectives and in different populations. Recently, Dr. Dan Johnson (Washington and Lee University) has extended this work to see whether the empathic responses promoted by fiction might translate to prosocial behavior, or the helping of others. In his study, participants read a short-story specifically designed to induce compassion and provide a model for prosocial behavior. Soon after reading, an experimenter accidentally dropped six pens. The key measurement was whether the participant helped the experimenter to pick up the pens. Higher levels of engagement with the story and higher levels of emotional empathy after reading predicted whether people were more likely to help the experimenter. In a second study, Dr. Johnson replicated this finding, increasing confidence in this effect. This is an intriguing study in that it demonstrates that short-term increases in empathy as a result of reading can result in actual prosocial behavior. Johnson, D. R. (in press). Transportation into a story increases empathy, prosocial behavior, and perceptual bias toward fearful expressions. Personality and Individual Differences. * In what is becoming a disturbing trend, I must apologize for the lateness of this posting. As always, I am happy to provide a copy of the original article upon request (see profile for e-mail).

Monday, May 23, 2011

Research Bulletin: Finding Matthew

Its practically a truism that reading does wonders for ones verbal ability. This idea is one of the major reasons why early literacy is stressed so heavily, long before children can read on their own. Children who are exposed to books at an early age are thought to develop better abilities that relate to reading (e.g., word recognition) and this in turn promotes a reading habit. Those who are better at reading are likely to do it more often, which in turn further improves their ability to read and so on. This circular or reciprocal causation is sometimes known as the Matthew effect, in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. In the case of reading, those who read get better at reading and read more, whereas those who dont read get worse at reading and read less. The Matthew effect originated in sociology and refers to this biblical passage: For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. - Matthew 25:29 Keith Stanovich was the first to import this term from sociology into the field of education and reading. Dr. Stanovich is a long time colleague of Dr. Keith Oatley, one of our editors, and Dr. Stanovich has been a valuable influence for many of us here at OnFiction.ca. Recently, a wonderful meta-analysis summarizing the results of many previous studies was conducted by Drs. Suzanne Mol and Adriana Bus (Leiden University), examining how reading relates to verbal ability. Their analysis found ample evidence that reading is associated with better performance on a wealth of different verbal tasks, across the lifespan (from preschoolers, through grades 1 to 12, all the way to undergraduate and graduate school years). Moreover,

these findings were based on a large number of studies (i.e., 99) which tested a great number of participants (i.e., 7,699). This, combined with the careful conduct of the meta-analysis, greatly increases our confidence in their conclusion that reading is a highly important activity when it comes to language development and perhaps even intelligence in general. Although the data available to them did not allow for a direct test of the Matthew effect, their findings were consistent with a rich get richer phenomenon for reading. Meta-analytic reviews such as this are very difficult to conduct, yet the provide the best picture available for what science can tell us about a particular topic. These authors are to be commended for their efforts, for we now know with a reasonable amount of certainty just how important reading is across the lifespan. (As always, readers interested in a copy of this important paper are invited to contact me; e-mail available in profile.) Mol, S. E., & Bus, A. G. (2011). To read or not to read: A metaanalysis of print exposure from infancy to early adulthood. Psychological Bulletin, 137, 267-296.