Question: Why did you choose to study romantic novels?

Rose Turner answered on 13 Jun 2017:

Hey Elizabeth!

I have been looking at the relationships between experience of different fictional genres and people’s social cognitive skills (which is the ability to understand what other people think and feel in real life – by interpreting subtle facial cues and things like that). Romance is an interesting genre, because it involves a lot of emphasis on close personal relationships. However the characters in romance books and films are often quite stereotyped, so the characters are not very complicated, like real human characters tend to be. Fiction seems to be good for our social skills, but there is currently a lot of debate around whether that’s the case for all forms of fiction (including easy-reads like popular fiction, as well as soaps and rom coms) or whether the fiction needs to be complicated ‘literary’ fiction (which are the more complicated works you might study in an English Literature class). When we can answer this question, it will tell us more about the psychological processes involved in enhancing our real-world social cognitive skills, and we will know more about what stories we should read/watch if we want to develop and enhance them! 🙂