Exploring the relationship between fiction reading and emotion recognition

Abstract Research has shown an association between reading fiction and the ability to recognize emotions in both ourselves and others. Here we propose an account of these research findings which requires distinguishing between literary and popular fiction and, thus, between implicit and explicit emotionality in the language of fiction. We report a reanalysis of data from two studies showing that exposure to literary (but not popular) fiction is associated positively with emotion recognition in others (Study 1) and negatively with alexithymia - a deficit in recognizing our own emotion (Study 2). We then present findings from a corpus analysis (Study 3) showing that the likelihood that a novel is literary (vs. popular) increases with the degree of implicit (vs. explicit) emotionality in its language. These results suggest that our interpersonal and intrapersonal emotion recognition skills might benefit by reading fiction that triggers inferential processes about emotion, instead of fiction that is replete with emotion words.