This week’s blog post is a wonderful example of what happens when colleagues are given the opportunity to work together on a common project. Last summer at the first LSU YA Literature Conference and Seminar Dr. Louise Freeman, from Mary Baldwin College offered a workshop entitled “Divergent Thinking: Psychology and Neuroscience as Keys to Understanding Roth’s Dystopian World” and a breakout session entitled “Harry Potter and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual”. Louise’s participation is interesting; as you might guess from the titles of her contributions to the conference, she isn’t an English Educator or a scholar of Young Adult Literature per se. She is a professor of Psychology who just happens to be a fan of Harry Potter (you might check out her website http://www.hogwartsprofessor.com/) and other young adult fiction. I will let her tell the story of her time at the conference and the resulting collaboration. Oh, check out the details and speakers for this year's conference here.
One of the great things about attending a conference is meeting people who share your interests, especially when they are in a different field. In June 2014, at the first annual LSU YAL Conference and Symposium, I had the pleasure of meeting Martha Guarisco, a sixth-grade English teacher at Episcopal School of Baton Rouge. At my breakout presentation on Harry Potter and depictions of mental illness, we discovered we were both interested in the ability of YAL to promote empathy towards others. That connection launched a successful collaborative study.
Ms. Guarisco had already planned an academic unit for her students using R.J. Palacio’s best-selling book Wonder. It is the story of a 10-year-old boy with severe facial deformities attending school for the first time, and struggling to be accepted by his peers. In an effort to use the book to build not only reading skills but also character, Ms. Guarisco had developed a series of empathy-building activities to go with the reading. She asked me if I knew of a way to measure empathy before and after the academic unit.
One of the great things about attending a conference is meeting people who share your interests, especially when they are in a different field. In June 2014, at the first annual LSU YAL Conference and Symposium, I had the pleasure of meeting Martha Guarisco, a sixth-grade English teacher at Episcopal School of Baton Rouge. At my breakout presentation on Harry Potter and depictions of mental illness, we discovered we were both interested in the ability of YAL to promote empathy towards others. That connection launched a successful collaborative study.
Ms. Guarisco had already planned an academic unit for her students using R.J. Palacio’s best-selling book Wonder. It is the story of a 10-year-old boy with severe facial deformities attending school for the first time, and struggling to be accepted by his peers. In an effort to use the book to build not only reading skills but also character, Ms. Guarisco had developed a series of empathy-building activities to go with the reading. She asked me if I knew of a way to measure empathy before and after the academic unit.
As it happened, I did, having used a common psychological test for empathy, the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI), in earlier studies of Hunger Games and Divergent fans. The IRI measures empathy on four subscales. Interestingly, Davis (1983), the test developer, recognized that one subtype of empathy is the tendency to get emotionally caught up in books, movies, or plays. He measured this trait with the Fantasy Scale. The other three subscales that make up the IRI are:
· Perspective Taking: the tendency to spontaneously adopt another’s point-of-view
· Empathetic Concern: the tendency to feel pity or concern for another person in distress
· Personal Distress: the tendency to feel emotional pain yourself when seeing another person in difficulty
Both my work and others’ (e.g. Mar and Oatley, 2009) suggest readers of all ages can use fiction as a “safe zone” in which to rehearse emotional reactions towards others, even in circumstances when it might be difficult to feel empathy in real life. For example, real-world Personal Distress scores tend to correlate negatively with Perspective-Taking, because it is hard to objectively adopt another’s point of view when you are yourself distressed. In the fictional world, it seems to be easier for a person to feel both types of empathy simultaneously; therefore Empathic Concern and Perspective-Taking scores for fictional characters correlate positively (Nomura and Akai, 2012).
Ms. Guarisco and I arranged to administer the IRI to her students anonymously by computer. We tested the students in early September 2014, just before they began the Wonder unit. In mid-November, after the unit, we tested them again, and compared the two sets of scores. The Wonder-based empathy exercises seemed to be effective; statistical analysis showed a significant increase in Perspective-Taking scores (Fig. 1) Interestingly, the Empathic Concern, Personal Distress and Fantasy Scale scores did not increase. This reassures us that the increase in Perspective-Taking is probably a direct result of the Wonder unit, rather than the children trying to meet teacher expectations by giving “nicer” answers on the second round of testing. If that were the case, we would have expected to see increases in all four subscales.
· Perspective Taking: the tendency to spontaneously adopt another’s point-of-view
· Empathetic Concern: the tendency to feel pity or concern for another person in distress
· Personal Distress: the tendency to feel emotional pain yourself when seeing another person in difficulty
Both my work and others’ (e.g. Mar and Oatley, 2009) suggest readers of all ages can use fiction as a “safe zone” in which to rehearse emotional reactions towards others, even in circumstances when it might be difficult to feel empathy in real life. For example, real-world Personal Distress scores tend to correlate negatively with Perspective-Taking, because it is hard to objectively adopt another’s point of view when you are yourself distressed. In the fictional world, it seems to be easier for a person to feel both types of empathy simultaneously; therefore Empathic Concern and Perspective-Taking scores for fictional characters correlate positively (Nomura and Akai, 2012).
Ms. Guarisco and I arranged to administer the IRI to her students anonymously by computer. We tested the students in early September 2014, just before they began the Wonder unit. In mid-November, after the unit, we tested them again, and compared the two sets of scores. The Wonder-based empathy exercises seemed to be effective; statistical analysis showed a significant increase in Perspective-Taking scores (Fig. 1) Interestingly, the Empathic Concern, Personal Distress and Fantasy Scale scores did not increase. This reassures us that the increase in Perspective-Taking is probably a direct result of the Wonder unit, rather than the children trying to meet teacher expectations by giving “nicer” answers on the second round of testing. If that were the case, we would have expected to see increases in all four subscales.
The results were the same in boys and girls. Fifteen of the 68 children tested, (12 girls, 3 boys) had read Wonder on their own before encountering it in English class. This group, overall, had higher Fantasy Scale scores than the other children, probably because they read books on their own more often than the others. However, they still made the same gains in Perspective-Taking that the other children did, suggesting they could benefit from the empathy-building activities, even if the book itself was not new to them.
Our study proved timely. In July 2014, s Ms. Guarisco and I were preparing our experiment, a study from Italy (Vezzali et al., 2014) was published, and quickly made headlines. Using a similar before-and-after experimental design, Vezzali’s team tested elementary-aged children and found that a six-week unit of reading and discussing specific Harry Potter scenes that related to prejudice reduced negative feelings toward a minority group--in this case, immigrants. Furthermore, the reduction was greater in the students who identified more with Harry, and less with Voldemort.
Our study proved timely. In July 2014, s Ms. Guarisco and I were preparing our experiment, a study from Italy (Vezzali et al., 2014) was published, and quickly made headlines. Using a similar before-and-after experimental design, Vezzali’s team tested elementary-aged children and found that a six-week unit of reading and discussing specific Harry Potter scenes that related to prejudice reduced negative feelings toward a minority group--in this case, immigrants. Furthermore, the reduction was greater in the students who identified more with Harry, and less with Voldemort.
While Vezzali et al. measured prejudice against a specific group of people, we measured empathy on a much more general scale. However, the results from the two studies are complementary. Seeing the world from other people’s point of view is probably essential to reducing prejudice against them.
The great Atticus Finch once told Scout that understanding a person required that “you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” The ability to take another’s perspective is an important cognitive aspect of empathy and likely the first step towards reducing stigmatization of someone different. Our study suggests that you don’t need an ultra-popular cultural phenomenon like Harry Potter to cultivate empathy in children through reading. All it seems to require is the right book, the right lessons and the right teacher.
The great Atticus Finch once told Scout that understanding a person required that “you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” The ability to take another’s perspective is an important cognitive aspect of empathy and likely the first step towards reducing stigmatization of someone different. Our study suggests that you don’t need an ultra-popular cultural phenomenon like Harry Potter to cultivate empathy in children through reading. All it seems to require is the right book, the right lessons and the right teacher.
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