Can less actually mean more?

Reading fiction is filled with encounters with emotions. However, emotions in fiction may not be communicated in the same way across different types of fiction, particularly literary and popular fiction. Castano (2024) argues that the presence of emotions differs between literary and popular fiction.

Overview

 Literary fiction conveys emotions in a nuanced, intangible, and indirect manner, requiring readers to engage in deeper cognitive and emotional inference to understand characters' affective states, while popular fiction presents emotions more explicitly and accessibly, providing clear emotional cues that reduce the need for interpretation. According to his view, the likelihood of a work being classified as literary, but not popular, increases with higher implicit emotion, while a greater presence of explicit emotion decreases this likelihood, a concept referred to as the "less-is-more" hypothesis (Castano, 2024).

In fact, he argues against the straightforward idea that reading literary fiction enhances emotion recognition simply because literary fiction is replete with affective words (Castano, 2024). Instead, literary fiction, but not popular fiction, enhances emotion recognition most effectively—and makes it automatic—because it avoids explicitly labeling emotions (e.g., "Raymond is sad") and instead "shows" emotional states through concrete descriptions and implicit cues.

This approach, therefore, triggers inferential processes, training readers to better recognize others' mental states, enhancing two closely related social cognition abilities, namely mentalizing—where individuals attempt to understand others' perspectives—and emotion recognition—where individuals become more adept at identifying others’ emotions, particularly through non-verbal cues—beyond the fictional context (Castano, 2024).

Disclaimer

This blog post is based on scientific research and is intended solely for public awareness.

For detailed information, please refer to the original article.

Castano, E. (2024). Less Is More: How the Language of Fiction Fosters Emotion Recognition. Emotion Review, 16(2), 73-83. https://doi.org/10.1177/17540739241232350

Picture Credit.

Still Life With Books And Vase, Art Painting by Claude Raguet Hirst