Less Is More: How the Language of Fiction Fosters Emotion Recognition

Abstract

Stories, in pictorial format, orally narrated, and later on as narrative texts, have played a key role in human evolution and to this day continue to surreptitiously teach us things and skills. In recent decades, psychologists and cognitive scientists have begun documenting the role of stories, and particularly fiction, in refining our sociocognitive skills. In this essay, I focus specifically on how stories, particularly written fiction, hone our emotion recognition skills. I present a brief overview of existing theorizing and research findings, and propose the less-is-more hypothesis, according to which emotion recognition skills are sharpened by stories that do not tell us, but rather show us the emotional life of fictional characters.