ArticleFrontiers in psychology2026
Internal focalization influences real-life empathy: a literary contribution to wellbeing.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
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Abstract
Literature has often been hypothesized to cultivate an empathy that persists after reading, yielding real-life wellbeing benefits. But the subtle complexity of literature's aesthetic form has made this hypothesis challenging to test. To simplify the challenge, we isolated a single formal technique-internal focalization-historically used by literary fictions that focus on a specific kind of empathy: forgiveness. We incorporated internal focalization into a fictional narrative, and across three preregistered studies (
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