http://wires.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WiresArticle/wisId-WCS1185.html
Fiction might be dismissed as observations that lack reliability and
validity, but this would be a misunderstanding. Works
of fiction are simulations that run on minds. They were the first
kinds of simulation. All art has a metaphorical quality:
a painting can be both pigments on canvas and a person. In literary
art, this quality extends to readers who can be both themselves
and, by empathetic processes within a simulation, also literary
characters. On the basis of this hypothesis, it was found
that the more fiction people read the better were their skills of
empathy and theory‐of‐mind; the inference from several studies
is that reading fiction improves social skills. In functional
magnetic resonance imaging meta‐analyses, brain areas concerned
with understanding narrative stories were found to overlap with those
concerned with theory‐of‐mind. In an orthogonal effect,
reading artistic literature was found to enable people to change
their personality by small increments, not by a writer's
persuasion, but in their own way. This effect was due to artistic
merit of a text, irrespective of whether it was fiction
or non‐fiction. An empirically based conception of literary art might
be carefully constructed verbal material that enables
self‐directed personal change. WIREs Cogn Sci 2012, 3:425–430. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1185 (abstract)
