The Use of “Literary Fiction” to Promote Mentalizing Ability

“Interpersonal Reactivity Index cognitive sub-scales (IRI): the IRI, which Davis [30] developed, is the most frequently used self-administered instrument to assess the different components of empathy.”

“In these pictures, taken from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) [44], the stimuli show individuals feeling different emotions: positive emotions (25 pictures that include emotions such as happiness, positive surprise) and negative emotions (25 pictures that include emotions such as sadness, anger, disa…”

“For the post-reading phase, we used the following measures Empathy Quotient- Emotional sub-scale [46, 38].”

“For the pre-reading phase, we used the following measures: Basic Empathy Scale-Affective Empathy Sub-scale (AES) [28, 29]: the AES is comprised of 11 items (N° 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 11, 13, 15, 17, 18) that measure congruence with another person’s emotions [18].”

“[36] developed to measure the different aspects of empathy [37–40].”

“Happè’s task is more advanced than previous tests of theory of mind.”

“Recent studies [10, 11] have pointed towards reading literary texts as a means of enhancing empathic abilities.”

“In a recent study, Kidd and Castano (2013) found that reading literary fiction increases mentalizing ability and may change how people think about other people’s emotions and mental states.”

“Example of items on the AES are: “My friend’s emotions don’t affect me much” or “I often get swept up in my friend’s feelings”.”

“Specifically, regarding mentalizing, we used measures that evaluated three aspects of this competence: cognitive empathy, perspective taking and mind-reading according to Zaki and Ochsner’ s model [8].”

“Multifaceted Empathy Test (MET)—Cognitive Empathy (CE): the CE component evaluates the capacity of the subjects to infer the emotional and mental states of the individuals shown in the image [2, 6, 43].”

“Empathy is the capacity to share the physiological and emotional states of other people [1, 2, 3].”

“Multifaceted Empathy Test (MET)—Cognitive Empathy (CE): the CE component evaluates the capacity of the subjects to infer the emotional and mental states of the individuals shown in the image [2, 6, 43].”

“Validation studies are lacking for this test [33].”

“Moreover, we hypothesize that this lack of emotional engagement in science fiction books could make them more suitable to potential treatments involving individuals with autism [20, 21].”

“An example of first-order theory of mind is “The washing machine task” [41,42]; whereas an example of second-order theory of mind is “The wallpaper” [41].”

“Attribution of Intentions Task [35]: the concept of attribution of intentions to others is a central element of what is often referred to as theory of mind.”

“Their findings underscore the role that reading can play in supporting children’s development of emotional and social skills [13, 14].”

“The stronger the affective representation, the more likely he/she is able to experience empathy in the social context [51].”

“Example of items on the AES are: “My friend’s emotions don’t affect me much” or “I often get swept up in my friend’s feelings”.”

“Multifaceted Empathy Test (MET)—Cognitive Empathy (CE): the CE component evaluates the capacity of the subjects to infer the emotional and mental states of the individuals shown in the image [2, 6, 43].”

“’s [50] and Bal and Veltkamp’ s [47] results, in our study the fiction group showed significant differences compared to the other two groups in the performance-based measures.”

“Moreover, reading fiction also seems to improve mentalizing among adults[15, 16].”

“These results may set important goals for future low-cost rehabilitation treatment for several disorders in which a deficit of ToM is considered “core” to the disease such as in the treatment of individuals with schizophrenia [48] and autism [6].”

“and it enables us to interact successfully in social groups [9].”

“Recent studies [10, 11] have pointed towards reading literary texts as a means of enhancing empathic abilities.”

“Studies on emotional and social components involved during the reading of literary texts, however, are scarce, and only a few studies have specifically investigated the affective processes underlying story processing [12, 17].”

“In fact, according to Coman and Richardson' s study [49], these measures evaluate different aspects of cognitive and emotional functioning: self-reported functioning reflects the perception that a person has about his/her performance of tasks [49]; whereas, performancebased measures are more objective and assess the a…”

“Multifaceted Empathy Test (MET)—Cognitive Empathy (CE): the CE component evaluates the capacity of the subjects to infer the emotional and mental states of the individuals shown in the image [2, 6, 43].”

“For the post-reading phase, we used the following measures Empathy Quotient- Emotional sub-scale [46, 38].”

“Their findings underscore the role that reading can play in supporting children’s development of emotional and social skills [13, 14].”

“An example of first-order theory of mind is “The washing machine task” [41,42]; whereas an example of second-order theory of mind is “The wallpaper” [41].”

“The IRI does not provide a total score because each sub-scale evaluates an independent component of empathy [3, 31, 32].”

“Researchers have distinguished between and compared “literary” fiction to “popular” fiction (e.g., Kidd & Castano, 2013; Pino & Mazza, 2016) with the former described as focused on character development, and the latter on plot development (Kidd et al., 2016).”

“…have found that reading literary fiction results in an immediate improvement on ToM measures relative to non-literary fiction or non-fiction (Kidd and Castano 2013; Pino and Mazza 2016), more recent large-scale attempts to replicate these findings have found null results (Panero et al. 2016).”

“…have successfully demonstrated a causal influence of stories on mentalizing ability have either employed a long-term intervention (e.g., reading a book for 2 weeks; Pino & Mazza, 2016) or a within-subjects design that controls for individual differences between conditions (Black & Barnes, 2015a).”

“…design, in which the same people read both a story and a control text (Black & Barnes, 2015a), or a longitudinal design, in which people read an entire book over a 2-week span (with mentalizing measured using false-belief tasks and a full-face version of the RMET; Pino & Mazza, 2016).”