Literary Reading and Mental Wellbeing

Billington, Josie ORCID: 0000-0002-0632-612X and Steenberg, Mette (2021) Literary Reading and Mental Wellbeing. In: Handbook of Empirical Literary Studies. De Gruyter,Berlin, pp. 393-420. ISBN 9783110644784

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Abstract

Literary reading and health has become an established field in the twenty-first century, impelled in part by the widespread phenomenon of reading groups in Europe and North America. Research has investigated the power of reading groups and shared reading to alleviate mental and physical health conditions (depression, dementia, chronic pain) by encouraging and enhancing mental processes, including: re-appraisal (of difficult experiences, attitudes towards self and others) and meta-cognition (the ability to think about one’s own thought processes, including how to connect affective and cognitive responses and modify cognitive mode). The extent to which the complexity of literary texts (including stylistic and syntactic defamiliarization) helps mediate the observed and reported health benefits of shared reading is one strong current focus of research. Shared reading groups as a technology to enable emotionally sharing human communities is equally an important strand of exploration. Published research crosses diverse disciplines - literature, linguistics, medicine, sociology, and psychology. It employs a wide breadth of procedures that range from: (a) established methods (e. g., psychological experimentation, standardized quantitative measures); (b) established qualitative methods (e. g., Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, Discourse Analysis, Ethnographic fieldwork); and (c) new quantitative tools for analyzing the phenomenology of reading and innovative qualitative methods (e. g., video-assisted interviews and micro-phenomenological interviews). These multi-disciplinary initiatives combine experiential approaches with physiological measures (e. g., real-time heart rate, galvanic skin response) to capture the underlying biological mechanisms involved in the dynamic cognition, affective/emotional reactions, and animated thought produced by reading.

Item Type:	Book Section
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Behavioral and Social Science, Depression, Mind and Body, Mental Health, Brain Disorders, Mental health, Generic health relevance, 3 Good Health and Well Being
Divisions:	Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of the Arts
Depositing User:	Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited:	26 Oct 2021 12:39
Last Modified:	17 Mar 2024 08:38
DOI:	10.1515/9783110645958-016
Related URLs:	Publisher
URI:	https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3141274