Exploring the Relationship Between Fiction Reading and Emotion Recognition

Fiction reading experience affects emotion recognition abilities, yet the causal link remains underspecified. Current theory suggests fiction reading promotes the simulation of fictional minds, which supports emotion recognition skills. We examine the extent to which contextualized statistical experience with emotion category labels in language is associated with emotion recognition. Using corpus analyses, we demonstrate fiction texts reliably use emotion category labels in an emotive sense (e.g., cry of relief), whereas other genres often use alternative senses (e.g., hurricane relief fund). Furthermore, fiction texts were shown to be a particularly reliable source of information about complex emotions. The extent to which these patterns affect human emotion concepts was analyzed in two behavioral experiments. In experiment 1 (n = 134), experience with fiction text predicted recognition of emotions employed in an emotive sense in fiction texts. In experiment 2 (n = 387), fiction reading experience predicted emotion recognition abilities, overall. These results suggest that long-term language experience, and fiction reading, in particular, supports emotion concepts through exposure to these emotions in context.