Here another of my grandmothers. I’m really not a lucky one (should it really be true that GrMa is a password to any high positioned intelligence office? I always hope not, but angels do seem notto listen to my hopes anymore ….) She has been reading with greatest interest my extremely interesting articles for the last 7 days, plunging even into an internal self discovery procedure without more results than the following: she has very similar features with someone called Heleni, in Greece, who at that time was about 32 (must be 35 now). She didn’t really solve the question of how to define empathetic in a congruous way, and asked herself whether the fact of misleading people into fiction could not be at the origin of the development of schizoid tendencies … In order to read fiction (yes, she is really younger than me, but it doesn’t matter), you need to have deep schemes of interpreation allowing the registration of information in general patterns, otherwise, long life to neuroleptics … In any case valuable as attempt of research, although I still couldn’t gather how they’d proove the one or the contrary. Who was first, the egg or the hen? (Spaniards ask.)
Research by Raymond A. Mar et al.
http://psych.utoronto.ca/%7Eraymond/bio.html
Mar, a psychologist at University of Toronto, shows in a recently published article that exposure to narrative fiction is positively associated with improved social abilities, a correlation not shown for non-fiction reading. Conceding that this subject has been understudied and that a causal direction has yet to be established, Mar concludes, “Should future work determine that fiction-reading interventions yield improvements in empathy, stories could prove a powerful tool for educating both children and adults about understanding others, an important skill currently under-stressed in most educational settings. If it proves to be the case that the causality of this relation is reversed—that being more empathetic predisposes people toward reading fiction—we will still have learned something interesying about fiction, and about empathic personality.”
Raymond A. Mar, Keith Oatley, Jacob Hirsch, Jennifer dela Paz, and Jordan Peterson, “Bookworms versus nerds: Exposure to fiction versus non-fiction, divergent associations with social ability, and the simulation of fictional social worlds.” Journal of Research in Personality 40(5). Oct 2006: 694-712.
