If you ever feel vaguely1 guilty about the vast amounts of television you watch, might I suggest you cling to the findings of this study, published last week in Psychology2 of Aesthetics3, Creativity, and the Arts. In it, the authors claim that watching high-quality television dramas -- things like Mad Men or The West Wing -- can increase your emotional intelligence. That is, watching good TV makes you more empathetic.
如果你曾因看太多电视，心中隐隐感到愧疚，我建议你看完以下研究结果。这是上周发表于《审美、创造及艺术心理学》上的。其中，研究作者称，观看高质量的电视剧——如《广告狂人》或《白宫风云》——可提高你的情商。也就是说，看优质电视节目让你更能体察他人。
In the paper, the authors describe two experiments that led them to their pro-TV conclusion. In one, they asked about 100 people to first watch either a television drama (Mad Men or The West Wing) or a nonfiction program (How the Universe Works or Shark Week:
Jaws4 Strikes Back).
Afterward5, all of the participants took a test psychologists often use to measure emotional intelligence: They're shown 36 pairs of eyes and are told to judge the emotion each pair is displaying. The results showed that the people who'd watched the fictionalized shows did better on this test than those who watched the nonfiction ones.
They tried this again, only switching up the programs (The Good Wife and Lost
versus7 Nova and Through the Wormhole) and adding a control group, too: people who took the eye-reading test without watching any television first. Again, their results showed that the fiction viewers' empathy scores were superior, though the nonfiction viewers' scored higher on average than those who hadn't watched anything beforehand.
It's a similar finding to a widely reported 2013 study that claimed that reading literary fiction is linked to better scores on this empathy-measuring test. The authors of that study and this new one argue that a complex
fictional6 narrative8 forces the reader or viewer to consider a problem from multiple perspectives; further, since not every character's emotion is
explicitly9 spelled out, the audience must do some mental work to fill in those gaps, making a guess at the inner lives of the character.
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