Empathy and Reading

Affect, Impact, and the Co-Creating Reader

Suzanne Keen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000595208
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This pioneering collection brings together Suzanne Keen's extensive body of work on empathy and reading, charting the development of narrative empathy as an area of inquiry in its own right and extending cross-disciplinary conversations about empathy evoked by reading.

The volume offers a brief overview of the trajectory of research following the 2007 publication of Empathy and the Novel, with empathy understood as a suite of related phenomena as stimulated by representations in narratives. The book is organized around three thematic sections—theories; empathetic readers; and interdisciplinary applications—each preceded by a short framing essay. The volume features excerpts from the author's seminal works on narrative empathy and makes available her harder-to-access contributions. The book brings different strands of the author's research into conversation with existing debates, with the aim of inspiring future interdisciplinary research on narrative empathy.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars in such fields as literary studies, cognitive science, emotion studies, affect studies, and applied contexts where empathetic practitioners work.

Part I Theories of Narrative Empathy

DOI: 10.4324/9781003264071-2

Theories of Narrative Empathy

This section opens with the first essay I published on the subject of empathy and reading, “A Theory of Narrative Empathy,” reproduced unabridged. I am forever indebted to James Phelan, who heard me deliver a conference paper on the subject, encouraged me to submit it to Narrative, and then cajoled me into doubling and then tripling the original submission. The remaining four pieces excerpted in this theoretical section extend beyond the ideas explored in Empathy and the Novel. For example, “Strategic Empathizing: Techniques of Bounded, Ambassadorial, and Broadcast Narrative Empathy” explores how and to what ends authors deliberately exploit the affordances of narrative empathy to reach audiences nearer and further away, developing with analysis of sample texts an aspect of my theory only briefly broached in “A Theory of Narrative Empathy” and in Empathy and the Novel. Both my 2018 chapter, “Narrative and the Embodied Reader” and my 2020 essay, “Empathic Inaccuracy in Narrative Fiction,” extend my thinking, augmenting my earlier, cursory discussions in Empathy and the Novel with deeper investigations of empathic phenomena.

“Narrative and the Embodied Reader” discusses narrative personal distress, or NPD, an aversive empathic response I had earlier reasoned had no place in a theory of narrative empathy. It corrects that decision, offering hypotheses about NPD and linking these legitimately empathic reading responses to the contemporary discussion of trigger warnings. Similarly, in “Empathic Inaccuracy in Narrative Fiction,” I revise my earlier, somewhat dismissive thinking about readers’ errant experiences of narrative empathy, which I call (narrative) empathic inaccuracy. Just because it is not what the author was going for doesn’t render a reader’s errant empathic response irrelevant. Indeed, both these corrective elaborations contribute to a view of narrative communication that genuinely respects readers’ contributions to textual co-creation, a topic explored in more detail in the selections in the second section, “Empathetic Readers.”

Conversations with audience-members over the years persuaded me that these and other aspects of my original theorizing deserved extension. For example, I have frequently been challenged by passionate advocates who related their empathic responses to different forms of nonfiction lifewriting, including memoirs, person-centered narrative history, biographies, prosopographies (group biographies), and testimonio; they insisted that these works evoked empathy as intensely as the novels and works of fiction I originally theorized. “Lifewriting and the Empathetic Circle” follows the path of further elaboration, broadening a theory that was based solely on fictional narrative to one specific variety of nonfiction, lifewriting. In Empathy and the Novel, I argued that writing perceived as fictional is especially effective at evoking readers’ empathy. Building on my discussion of narrative nonfiction in Narrative Form (2015) I proposed in this later work that lifewriting should be regarded as a special category of nonfiction that shares with fictional narratives the capacity to invite feeling responses and to evoke readers’ empathy.

1 A Theory of Narrative Empathy

DOI: 10.4324/9781003264071-3

We are living in a time when the activation of mirror neurons in the brains of onlookers can be recorded as they witness another’s actions and emotional reactions (Keysers, et al. 501; Gallese, et al. 396). Contemporary neuroscience has brought us much closer to an understanding of the neural basis for human mind reading and emotion sharing abilities—the mechanisms underlying empathy. The activation of onlookers’ mirror neurons by a coach’s demonstration of technique or an internal visualization of proper form and by representations in television, film, visual art, and pornography has already been recorded (Gallese, “Self-Other”). Simply hearing a description of an absent other’s actions lights up mirror neuron areas during fMRI imaging of the human brain (Tettamanti et al. 273). (Though most neuroscientists working on mirror neurons agree that the effects are strongest in real life, face-to-face interactions, what Gallese calls the “shared manifold for intersubjectivity” still operates when subjects see videos, experience virtual reality through computer interfaces, and simply hear narration about others [Blakeslee F1, F4]). The possibility that novel reading stimulates mirror neurons’ activation can now, as never before, undergo neuroscientific investigation. Neuroscientists have already declared that people scoring high on empathy tests have especially busy mirror neuron systems in their brains (Keysers, qtd. in Blakeslee F1, F4). Fiction writers are likely to be among these high empathy individuals. For the first time we might investigate whether human differences in mirror neuron activity can be altered by exposure to art, to teaching, to literature.

This newly enabled capacity to study empathy at the cellular level encourages speculation about human empathy’s positive consequences. These speculations are not new, as any student of eighteenth-century moral sentimentalism will affirm, but they dovetail with efforts on the part of contemporary virtue ethicists, political philosophers, educators, theologians, librarians, and interested parties such as authors and publishers to connect the experience of empathy, including its literary form, with outcomes of changed attitudes, improved motives, and better care and justice. Thus a very specific, limited version of empathy located in the neural substrate meets in the contemporary moment a more broadly and loosely defined, fuzzier sense of empathy as the feeling precursor to and prerequisite for liberal aspirations to greater humanitarianism. [Social and developmental psychologists, philosophers of virtue ethics, feminist advocates of an ethic of caring, and many defenders of the humanities believe that empathic emotion motivates altruistic action, resulting in less aggression, less fickle helping, less blaming of victims for their misfortunes, increased cooperation in conflict situations, and improved actions on behalf of needy individuals and members of stigmatized groups (Batson et al., “Benefits” 360–70; Slote, Morals from Motives 109–10).] The sense of crisis stirred up by reports of stark declines in reading goes into this mix, catalyzing fears that the evaporation of a reading public leaves behind a population incapable of feeling with others. Yet the apparently threatened set of links between novel reading, experiences of narrative empathy, and altruism has not yet been proven to exist.

This essay undertakes three tasks preliminary to the scrutiny of the empathy-altruism hypothesis as it might apply to experiences of narrative empathy. These tasks include: a discussion of empathy as psychologists understand and study it; a brief introduction to my theory of narrative empathy, including proposals about how narrative empathy works; and a review of the current research on the effects of specific narrative techniques on real readers.

What is Empathy?

Empathy, a vicarious, spontaneous sharing of affect, can be provoked by witnessing another’s emotional state, by hearing about another’s condition, or even by reading. Mirroring what a person might be expected to feel in that condition or context, empathy is thought to be a precursor to its semantic close relative, sympathy. [Although the word empathy is a relatively young term, entering English in the early twentieth century as a coined translation of the German word Einfühlung, aspects of empathy have been described by philosophers since the days of Adam Smith and David Hume under the older term sympathy.] Personal distress, an aversive emotional response also characterized by apprehension of another’s emotion, differs from empathy in that it focuses on the self and leads not to sympathy but to avoidance. The distinction between empathy and personal distress matters because empathy is associated with the moral emotion sympathy (also called empathic concern) and thus with prosocial or altruistic action (Batson, Altruism 56–7; Eisenberg, “Emotion, Regulation” 671–2; “Development”). Empathy that leads to sympathy is by definition other-directed, whereas an over-aroused empathic response that creates personal distress (self-oriented and aversive) causes a turning-away from the provocative condition of the other. None of the philosophers who put stock in the morally improving experience of narrative empathy include personal distress in their theories. Because novel reading can be so easily stopped or interrupted by an unpleasant emotional reaction to a book, however, personal distress has no place in a literary theory of empathy, though it certainly contributes to aesthetic emotions, such as those Sianne Ngai describes in her important book Ugly Feelings.

In empathy, sometimes described as an emotion in its own right, we feel what we believe to be the emotions of others. [Charles Darwin’s treatment of sympathy in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals clearly includes empathy, though he does not use the term. Paul Ekman, the leading authority on facial expressions as indicators of universal human emotions, does not treat empathy as a core emotion, but as one of the nine starting points for emotional reactions (when we feel what others feel). (Ekman, Emotions Revealed 34, 37). Neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp argues that emotional systems in the brain involve central affective programs comprised of neural anatomy, physiology, and chemicals. Panksepp considers empathy one of the higher sentiments (mixing lower, reflexive affects and higher cognitive processes), emerging out of the recent evolutionary expansion of the forebrain (142–3). For philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum, empathy comes into play as a part of compassion, which she treats as a human emotion (Upheaveals 327–35). For John Deigh and those working at the intersection of ethics and cognitive science, empathy is one of the moral emotions.]

Empathy is thus agreed to be both affective and cognitive by most psychologists. Empathy is distinguished in both psychology and philosophy (though not in popular usage) from sympathy, in which feelings for another occur.

So, for instance, one may distinguish empathy from sympathy in this fashion:

Empathy:	Sympathy:
I feel what you feel.	I feel a supportive emotion
I feel your pain.	about your feelings.
	I feel pity for your pain.

These examples emphasize negative emotions—pain and pity—but it should be noted from the outset that although psychological and philosophical studies of empathy have tended to gravitate towards the negative, empathy also occurs for positive feelings of happiness, satisfaction, elation, triumph, and sexual arousal. [Positive forms of empathy are drastically underemphasized in the literature (Ainslie and Monterosso)]. All of these positive kinds of empathy play into readers’ pleasure, or jouissance. [See Barthes for the distinction between the relatively easy pleasure of the readerly text and the bliss that comes when the demanding writerly text helps readers break out of their subject positions.]

Experts on emotional contagion, the communication of one’s mood to others, have done a better job of studying the full range of emotional states that can be shared through our automatic mimicry of one another. [See for instance the treatment of happiness, joy, and love in Hatfield, et al., Emotional Contagion. Theodor Lipps, an important early theorist of empathy, proposed motor mimicry as an automatic response to another’s expression of emotion (“Das Wissen von Fremden Ichen”).] Indeed, primitive emotional contagion, or “the tendency to automatically mimic and synchronize facial expressions, vocalizations, postures, and movements with those of another person and consequently, to converge emotionally” offers a compelling explanation of a component of our empathy as arising from our physical and social awareness of one another, from birth (Hatfield, et al. 81). Inherited traits play an important role in our disposition to experience emotional contagion, (Zahn-Waxler, et al.), but our personal histories and cultural contexts affect the way we understand automatically shared feelings. [Cultural differences implicate differences in the nature of emotional experience. Our understanding of what it means to be a person in our cultural context affects the way we experience daily emotions of pleasantness and unpleasantness, or whether we feel entitled as individuals to express a particular emotion (Shields).]

So, for instance, emotional contagion comes into play in our reactions to narrative, for we are also story-sharing creatures. The oral storyteller not only takes advantage of our tendency to share feelings socially by doing the voices and facial expressions of characters, but also tacitly trains young children and members of the wider social group to recognize and give priority to culturally valued emotional states. [Oral storytelling is not isolated to preliterate cultures. Children in literate cultures also absorb cultural values and narrative styles through collaborative storytelling (Minami and McCabe).] This education does not create our feelings, but renders emotional states legible through their labels, and activates our expectations about what emotions mean. Narratives in prose and film infamously manipulate our feelings and call upon our built-in capacity to feel with others. Indeed, the early history of empathy as a subject of study emphasized both emotional contagion and aesthetic responses.

The word empathy appeared as a translation of Einfühlung in the early twentieth century. In 1909, the experimental psychologist E. B. Titchener translated as “empathy” aesthetician Theodor Lipps’ term Einfühlung, which meant the process of “feeling one’s way into” an art object or another person (Titchener 181–5; Lipps, Zur Einfühlung). Notably, Titchener’s 1915 elaboration of the concept in A Beginner’s Psychology exemplifies empathy through a description of a reading experience: “We have a natural tendency to feel ourselves into what we perceive or imagine. As we read about the forest, we may, as it were, become the explorer; we feel for ourselves the gloom, the silence, the humidity, the oppression, the sense of lurking danger; everything is strange, but it is to us that strange experience has come” (198). In the beginning of the twentieth century, the English novelist Vernon Lee brought Einfühlung and empathy to a broader literary audience. In a public lecture followed by a [co-authored] magazine piece in a popular journal (Lee and Anstruther-Thomson), Lee advanced a theory of aesthetic perception of form involving empathy, though not (at first) so named. Originally Lee’s aesthetics focused on bodily sensations and muscular adjustments made by beholders of works of art and architecture and downplayed emotional responsiveness. By the time she revised and expanded her ideas for presentation in book form, however, Lee had adapted Lipps’ understanding of empathy, a parallel development from common sources in German aesthetics.

Defining the purpose of art as, in part, “the awakening, intensifying, or maintaining of definite emotional states” (Lee 99–100), Lee makes empathy a central feature of our collaborative responsiveness (128). In an account that combines motor mimicry, memory, and psychological responsiveness to inanimate objects, Lee argues that empathy enters into

imagination, sympathy, and also into that inference from our own inner experience which has shaped all our conceptions of an outer world, and given to the intermittent and heterogeneous sensations received from without the framework of our constant and highly unified inner experience, that is to say, of our own activities and aims.

(68)

No sooner had the term been announced and situated so centrally in aesthetic theory for an English-language audience, however, than it received brisk challenge from high modernist quarters. The disdain of Bertolt Brecht for empathy (and his advocacy of so-called alienation effects), the embrace of difficulty by modernist poets, and the dominance of New Criticism, which taught students to avoid the affective fallacy all interfered with the integration of empathy into literary theory until recently. Novelists and novel readers who prized experiences of emotional fusion cultivated narrative empathy throughout periods when the term was in eclipse.

How is Empathy Studied?

The focus on our embodied experience in feminist criticism, disability studies, cognitive approaches to narrative, and some ecocriticism, draws literary studies closer to disciplines that accept the use of making measurements, doing tests and experiments, and interpreting empirical evidence. This section explains some of the methods being used by neuroscientists and developmental and social psychologists to study empathy. Developing the conversation between literature and psychology ought to benefit both disciplines, however, and the subsequent comments on what is known and especially what has not yet been tested about the effects of narrative techniques contributes to a more nuanced application of psychonarratology to questions of interest to social and developmental psychologists.

Psychologists test and record empathy in a variety of ways. Physiological measures, sometimes combined with self-reports, can show the strength or weakness (or presence and absence) of empathic responses. [Evaluation of patients who show changes in behavior as a result of brain injuries, ailments, or surgery contributes to the understanding of empathy (Gratton and Elsinger).] Psychologists measure changes in heart rate and skin conductance (palm sweat). They collect data on perceptible and imperceptible facial reactions, the latter captured by EMG (electromyographic) procedures. [Physiological measures have the advantage of being unaffected by the subjects’ desire to present themselves favorably, as may occur in surveys, interviews, or self-reports (Eisenberg, et al., “Physiological”). On deceleration of heart rate in response to negative experiences of others, see K. D. Craig. On the measurement of palmar skin conductance and heart rate in response to images of people in pain, see R. S. Lazarus. For a skin conductance study suggesting that empathetic arousal occurs when subjects believe a person is receiving a painful shock, see Geer and Jarmecky. On facial or gestural responses as indications of empathy, see Marcus. See also Hoffman, “The Measurement of Empathy.” On EMG and other physiological measurements of emotional responses, see Cacioppo and Petty.]

[Psychologists] ask subjects how they feel or how...