Researchers at the New School for Social Research in New York have done their second study that found that people that read literary fiction are more empathetic that people that read pop fiction.
The researchers repeated the study after the first was criticized for being too vague. The first attempt asked to read excerpts from novels by Don DeLillo or Louise Erdrich or pop fiction from Danielle Steele and Gillian Flynn, then tried to measure the emotion in the readers eyes.
In the new study, participants saw a list of 130 names and asked if they were established authors. Sixty-five of the names were authors: some of which were pop fiction writers, the rest literary fiction writers. The test determined that people that identified more literary fiction writers had read more literary fiction.
The British Psychological Association has more details:
There was a clear pattern in the findings—the more literary fiction authors that participants recognised, the better they tended to perform on the emotional recognition test, and this association held even after statistically accounting for the influence of other factors that might be connected to both emotion skills and reading more literary fiction, such as past educational attainment, gender and age.