This research was conducted by Mikhail Sokolov and Nadezhda Sokolova at European University at Saint Petersburg, Russia
This paper examined data from public libraries in St Petersburg, Russia, to identify whether or not an ‘omnivorous’ reading habit is only associated with people in elite or privileged status groups. The researchers …
This research was conducted by Alexander Laffer at the University of Birmingham
This paper describes a study of five different book groups as they discussed the actions of characters from the novel The Other Hand by Chris Cleave. Participants tended to talk about the characters as if they were real …
This research was conducted by Nadezhda Sokolova and Mikhail Sokolov at European University at Saint Petersburg, Russia
This paper challenges the assumption that popular culture (rather than highbrow elite culture) is the ‘shared ground’ on which strangers like likely to meet and converse. The researchers analysed data from the St …
This research was conducted by Sara Suarez‐Fernandez and David Boto‐García at the University of Oviedo, Spain
This paper describes the reading habits of adults in Spain, with a focus on the way in which reading for work or study affects how people read for pleasure. The results suggested that …
This research was conducted by Joachim Vlieghe, Kris Rutten and Jaël Muls at Ghent University and the University of Brussels, Belgium
This paper looks at how readers participate in literary culture through social media. Researchers looked at the website and Facebook group of the Flemish reading initiative Iedereenleest.be (EverybodyReads.be), and …
This research was conducted by Jessica E. Black and Jennifer L. Barnes at the University of Oklahoma, USA
This study aimed to replicate previous findings that have shown reading literary fiction to enhance people’s Theory of Mind (the ability to infer and reason about our own and others’ beliefs, desires …
This research was conducted by Sabine Wollscheid at the Norwegian Knowledge Centre for the Health Services, Norway
This paper explored the impact of parents’ reading patterns on their children’s reading habits. Drawing on a sample of 757 school-aged children living in two-parent households in Germany, the research demonstrated that parents’ …
This research was conducted by P. Matthijs Bal and Martijn Veltkamp at VU University Amsterdam and FrieslandCampina, Deventer, The Netherlands
This study reports two experiments designed to measure changes in readers’ empathic skills over one week by getting participants to read either fiction or non-fiction writing. In the fiction groups, …
This research was conducted by David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano at the New School for Social Research, USA
This paper reports the results of five experiments designed to test whether reading literary fiction can improve people’s theory of mind. People with an effective theory of mind have an emotional …