User:Drdubski/Empathy in literature

Fiction
Mar et al., in a study of 94 participants, identified that the primary mode of literature that increases empathy is fiction, as opposed to non-fiction. Other studies verify these results and go on to specify that active fiction in particular engages with the reader and affects the reader’s empathy, at the very least in adults, rather than passive, entertainment fiction. This might be due to the parallels recognized between narrative and real-world comprehension as well as narrative fiction and real-world events. Empirical evidence, moreover, proved that fiction yielded a higher chance to get an individual involved in a narrative, while non-fiction did not. Fiction requires the reader to imagine the characters' situations and conditions, a phenomenon called “perspective taking."

The main literature on empathy looks at fiction, but other forms of literature are also important. For example, poetry is a more popular form to invoke empathy in neurodivergent readers, and it has the capacity to teach about high sensitivity when it comes to human difference.

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