Journal ArticleDOI
Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind
David Kidd,Emanuele Castano +1 more
TLDR
Experimental evidence suggests that reading good fiction helps us to understand others, and results show that reading literary fiction temporarily enhances Theory of Mind (ToM), and suggests that ToM may be influenced by engagement with works of art.Abstract:
Understanding others’ mental states is a crucial skill that enables the complex social relationships that characterize human societies. Yet little research has investigated what fosters this skill, which is known as Theory of Mind (ToM), in adults. We present five experiments showing that reading literary fiction led to better performance on tests of affective ToM (experiments 1 to 5) and cognitive ToM (experiments 4 and 5) compared with reading nonfiction (experiments 1), popular fiction (experiments 2 to 5), or nothing at all (experiments 2 and 5). Specifically, these results show that reading literary fiction temporarily enhances ToM. More broadly, they suggest that ToM may be influenced by engagement with works of art.read more
Citations
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Evaluating the replicability of social science experiments in Nature and Science between 2010 and 2015
Colin F. Camerer,Anna Dreber,Felix Holzmeister,Teck-Hua Ho,Jürgen Huber,Magnus Johannesson,Michael Kirchler,Gideon Nave,Brian A. Nosek,Brian A. Nosek,Thomas Pfeiffer,Adam Altmejd,Nick Buttrick,Nick Buttrick,Taizan Chan,Yiling Chen,Eskil Forsell,Anup Gampa,Anup Gampa,Emma Heikensten,Lily Hummer,Taisuke Imai,Siri Isaksson,Dylan Manfredi,Julia Rose,Eric-Jan Wagenmakers,Hang Wu +26 more
TL;DR: It is found that peer beliefs of replicability are strongly related to replicable, suggesting that the research community could predict which results would replicate and that failures to replicate were not the result of chance alone.
Journal ArticleDOI
Children and Adolescents and Digital Media
Yolanda Linda Reid Chassiakos,Jenny S. Radesky,Dimitri A. Christakis,Megan A. Moreno,Corinn Cross +4 more
TL;DR: This technical report reviews the literature regarding opportunities and risks of digital and social media for children from birth to adulthood, and recommends an appropriate balance between screen time/online time and other activities.
Journal ArticleDOI
Empathy: a motivated account.
TL;DR: Interdisciplinary evidence highlights the motivated nature of empathy, and a motivated model holds wide-ranging implications for basic theory, models of psychiatric illness, and intervention efforts to maximize empathy.
Journal ArticleDOI
The complex relation between morality and empathy
Jean Decety,Jason M. Cowell +1 more
TL;DR: This work proposes abandoning the catchall term of empathy in favor of more precise concepts, such as emotional sharing, empathic concern, and affective perspective-taking, to better understand relations between morality and empathy.
Journal ArticleDOI
Embers of society: Firelight talk among the Ju/’hoansi Bushmen
TL;DR: Comparison of day and nighttime conversations among the Ju/’hoan (!Kung) Bushmen of southern Africa, supplemented by 68 translated texts, suggests that day talk centers on economic matters and gossip to regulate social relations, and night talk plays an important role in evoking higher orders of theory of mind via the imagination.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
Development and validation of brief measures of positive and negative affect: The PANAS scales.
TL;DR: Two 10-item mood scales that comprise the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) are developed and are shown to be highly internally consistent, largely uncorrelated, and stable at appropriate levels over a 2-month time period.
Journal ArticleDOI
Actual Minds, Possible Worlds.
Journal ArticleDOI
The ''Reading the Mind in the Eyes'' Test Revised Version: A Study with Normal Adults, and Adults with Asperger Syndrome or High-functioning Autism
TL;DR: The Revised Eyes Test has improved power to detect subtle individual differences in social sensitivity and was inversely correlated with the Autism Spectrum Quotient (the AQ), a measure of autistic traits in adults of normal intelligence.
Book
Actual Minds, Possible Worlds
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present a reader's retelling of "Clay" by James Joyce and compare it with a novel version of the same story written by Anne Frank.
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