Fact or fiction?: Clarifying the relationship between reading and the improvement of social skills

Fact or fiction?: Clarifying the relationship between reading and the improvement of social skills
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事实还是虚构?:澄清阅读与社交技能提高之间的关系

DOI:
10.1075/ssol.20007.chl
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发表时间:
2020
期刊:
Scientific Study of Literature
影响因子:
--
通讯作者:
Weisberg, Deena Skolnick
Weisberg, Deena Skolnick
中科院分区:
--
文献类型:
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作者:
Chlebuch, Natasha;Goldstein, Thalia R.;Weisberg, Deena Skolnick

文献摘要

相似文献

许多研究声称,阅读小说有助于提高社会认知能力。但这项工作留下了一个关键问题,即是否任何类型的叙事,无论是虚构的还是非虚构的,都可能产生类似的效果。为了解决这一问题,同时也为了测试是否将叙事构建为虚构的文本,本研究向被试(研究1中的N= 268;研究2中的N= 362)呈现文学虚构文本、叙事性非虚构文本、说明性非虚构文本或没有文本。我们使用基于图片的阅读眼神任务和基于文本的高级社会认知测试来测试他们的心理理论能力。与不阅读相比,阅读任何东西都与更高的分数有关,但框架和文本类型的影响是不一致的。这些结果表明,先前关于阅读小说对精神化的积极影响的说法应该被视为站不住脚的;其他机制可能正在推动先前发表的影响。
Many studies have claimed to find that reading fiction leads to improvements in social cognition. But this work has left open the critical question of whether any type of narrative, fictional or nonfictional, might have similar effects. To address this question, as well as to test whether framing a narrative as fiction matters, the current studies presented participants (N= 268 in Study 1;N= 362 in Study 2) with literary fiction texts, narrative nonfiction texts, expository nonfiction texts, or no texts. We tested their theory-of-mind abilities using the picture-based Reading the Mind in the Eyes task and a text-based test of higher-order social cognition. Reading anything was associated with higher scores compared to reading nothing, but the effects of framing and text type were inconsistent. These results suggest that prior claims regarding positive effects of reading fiction on mentalizing should be seen as tenuous; other mechanisms may be driving previously published effects.