How Good Books Can Change You Ever read a book that's changed your life? You're not imagining it -- the process of digesting a character or a series of events actually turns you into a different person. Summer's here and time for summer reading at the beach, in a hammock or on the porch. Books are great for passing the time on lazy summer afternoons. And according to Ohio State researchers, the books you read from childhood on can also change who you are. They do this by a process the researchers called experience taking. Students who read a first person story about a voter from their own university also ended up much more likely to vote (65 percent) than those who read a first person story about a voter from another university (29 percent). It's not like reading about Superman and then thinking that you can fly. In different experiments, the researchers found that experience taking can change the likelihood of a person voting and also change their attitude about people of different race or sexual orientation.
Why To Read: 10 Reasons Why You Should Read More What Are The Benefits Of Reading? We started WhytoRead.com to encourage you to read more and to introduce you to new books that will benefit you. The benefits of reading are not limited to 10 but the top reasons in this article are the most powerful. By the time you’ve read this post, you should be encouraged to pick up that book you’ve been meaning to finish so you can start the next one. In terms of fiction or non-fiction, there are endless stories that can both broaden your understanding of the world or help you get through a sticking point in your life. Those who read have been known to have more finely-tuned brains than those who prefer more passive activities, so anyone hoping to improve their mind both psychologically and cognitively might want to think about taking up the habit of regular reading. 1. Although it doesn’t always make you a better communicator, those who read tend to have a more varied range of words to express how they feel and to get their point across. 2. 3. 4.
Psychologists Discover How People Subconsciously Become Their Favorite Fictional Characters Psychologists have discovered that while reading a book or story, people are prone to subconsciously adopt their behavior, thoughts, beliefs and internal responses to that of fictional characters as if they were their own. Experts have dubbed this subconscious phenomenon ‘experience-taking,’ where people actually change their own behaviors and thoughts to match those of a fictional character that they can identify with. Researcher from the Ohio State University conducted a series of six different experiments on about 500 participants, reporting in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, found that in the right situations, ‘experience-taking,’ may lead to temporary real world changes in the lives of readers. They found that stories written in the first-person can temporarily transform the way readers view the world, themselves and other social groups. "Experience-taking is much more immersive -- you've replaced yourself with the other," Libby said in a statement.
Teach the Seven Strategies of Highly Effective Readers By: Elaine K. McEwan To improve students' reading comprehension, teachers should introduce the seven cognitive strategies of effective readers: activating, inferring, monitoring-clarifying, questioning, searching-selecting, summarizing, and visualizing-organizing. This article includes definitions of the seven strategies and a lesson-plan template for teaching each one. To assume that one can simply have students memorize and routinely execute a set of strategies is to misconceive the nature of strategic processing or executive control. If the struggling readers in your content classroom routinely miss the point when "reading" content text, consider teaching them one or more of the seven cognitive strategies of highly effective readers. Struggling students often mistakenly believe they are reading when they are actually engaged in what researchers call mindless reading (Schooler, Reichle, & Halpern, 2004), zoning out while staring at the printed page. Instructional aids References
Can a fictional character take you over? | Books Good lord above! If this is really true then I dread to think what havoc is wreaked by people who've just finished reading A Clockwork Orange; what unrealistic expectations of romance are held by fans of Jane Austen; what heights of passion are reached by Wuthering Heights aficionados on a daily basis. Because, according to a new study from researchers at Ohio State University, "when you 'lose yourself' inside the world of a fictional character while reading a story, you may actually end up changing your own behaviour and thoughts to match that of the character". Just published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the study gave undergraduates various stories to read and observed their reactions. In another, 70 male, heterosexual students were given different versions of a story about a day in the life of another undergraduate. But I'm not sure this is hugely earth-shattering news to anyone who loves reading.
How To Become A Better Reader It’s easy to fill your time with Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook, checking email and glancing at news headlines. But sooner or later you yearn for the pleasure of a good book. The Internet wants us to click every other minute from site to site. This habit can stand in the way of an older kind of reading, one that offers real pleasure and understanding: settling down with a book and getting to know it as well as you can. Anyone can be a good reader, even in the Internet Age. When you read, keep your sense of fun, but combine it with the ambition to experience books as deeply as you can. Here are some rules that will help you with slow reading. BE PATIENT We must be patient in order to let ourselves listen to a book, to be open to it, and to give ourselves the time to figure things out. ASK THE RIGHT QUESTIONS When you read a book, think of yourself as a detective looking for clues. IDENTIFY THE VOICE How does the author of your book speak to the reader?
Novel Finding: Reading Literary Fiction Improves Empathy How important is reading fiction in socializing school children? Researchers at The New School in New York City have found evidence that literary fiction improves a reader’s capacity to understand what others are thinking and feeling. Emanuele Castano, a social psychologist, along with PhD candidate David Kidd conducted five studies in which they divided a varying number of participants (ranging from 86 to 356) and gave them different reading assignments: excerpts from genre (or popular) fiction, literary fiction, nonfiction or nothing. After they finished the excerpts the participants took a test that measured their ability to infer and understand other people’s thoughts and emotions. The researchers found, to their surprise, a significant difference between the literary- and genre-fiction readers. When study participants read non-fiction or nothing, their results were unimpressive. Literary fiction, by contrast, focuses more on the psychology of characters and their relationships.
How to Become a Better Writer | WTD “To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.” – Victor Hugo There are two ways to become a better writer, in general: write a lot, and read a lot. There are two ways to become a better writer: write a lot, and read a lotClick To Tweet There are no other steps. Of course, within those two general directives, there are lots of more specific advice I can give you. Why Reading Makes You a Better Writer I’ve been an avid reader since childhood, and I would submit that most good (and especially great) writers could say the same. Read can be pure joy, if you’re reading a good book. But beyond reading for pleasure, a good writer also reads with an eye for the writing. What we learn as readers, we use as writers. “Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. There’s no one way, of course. Create the reading habit. “I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes.
How Does Fiction Reading Influence Empathy? An Experimental Investigation on the Role of Emotional Transportation Citation: Bal PM, Veltkamp M (2013) How Does Fiction Reading Influence Empathy? An Experimental Investigation on the Role of Emotional Transportation. PLoS ONE8(1): e55341. Editor: Liane Young, Boston College, United States of America Received: September 4, 2012; Accepted: December 21, 2012; Published: January 30, 2013 Copyright: © 2013 Bal, Veltkamp. Funding: No current external funding sources for this study. Competing interests: Martijn Veltkamp is employed by FrieslandCampina. Introduction Reading books and watching movies, plays, and operas are activities that people carry out on a day-to-day basis in their lives. First, researchers have questioned the causal relationships between experience of fiction and empathy. Finally, the study investigates the role of emotional transportation [11] in the aforementioned relationships. Fiction, Non-fiction and Narrative Structures Effects of Fiction Experience on Empathy The Present Research Conclusion
Seven Strategies to Teach Students Text Comprehension 1. Monitoring comprehension Students who are good at monitoring their comprehension know when they understand what they read and when they do not. They have strategies to "fix" problems in their understanding as the problems arise. Comprehension monitoring instruction teaches students to: Be aware of what they do understand Identify what they do not understand Use appropriate strategies to resolve problems in comprehension 2. Metacognition can be defined as "thinking about thinking." Students may use several comprehension monitoring strategies: Identify where the difficulty occurs "I don't understand the second paragraph on page 76." 3. Graphic organizers illustrate concepts and relationships between concepts in a text or using diagrams. Regardless of the label, graphic organizers can help readers focus on concepts and how they are related to other concepts. Graphic organizers can: Here are some examples of graphic organizers: 4. Questions can be effective because they: 5. 6. 7.