Emotions and Reading
University of Washington
Fall 2020
An Experimental design study to understand the effect of reading children’s literature on a person’s self-compassion.
Problem
Reading has the potential to significantly impact a reader’s mood. Some books scare us, some make us sad, and some make us laugh. In 2020, the sheer amount of negative and terrifying news has been overwhelming; ranging from issues such as climate change, politics, the ongoing pandemic, and beyond. With this in mind, my team wanted to test whether different genres of reading can actually impact a reader’s self-compassion.
Understanding how reading can impact self-compassion could add to the already existing research on reading’s impact on things such as empathy or compassion, and could have a lasting effect for considering reading as a tool in different spaces, such as therapy.
Role
I served as the main coordinator for the team and was in charge of survey distribution. I also acted as a researcher for the entire project.
Question
Do different genres of reading impact the self-compassion of a user in varying ways?
Process
Literature Review
Recruitment & Study Design
Data Analysis &Findings
Implications
Logistics
HCDE 516
Topic: Experimental Research Design
10 Week Project
Team of 4
Literature Review
Diving into our secondary research, we found a lot of studies analyzing the effects of reading on a reader’s empathy and compassion skills. Both of these are vital social skills for a person to have, but it is hard for someone to feel compassion for someone else, if they are unable to feel compassion for themselves.
Research shows that self-compassion can lead to greater empathy in children as well as healthier social relationships with those around them. As there was not much research on the effects of reading on self-compassion, we decided to focus our study design on self-compassion as the dependent variable.
Hypothesis
Reading a fictional children’s book will increase base levels of self-compassion more so than reading a news article.
Recruitment & Study Design
Once we finished our preliminary research, our next step was to start recruiting and create a meaningful study design for our experiment that would yield impactful data.
Recruitment
Due to time constraints and COVID-19, we relied heavily on our graduate program community and our own social circles. We did not specifically exclude any potential participants, however, we did not recruit people who were taking this graduate class with us, as they would know the details of our study, which would impact the results. We recruited a total of 23 participants, which were then split into two different groups. 3 participants dropped before completion of the study.
Study Design
We employed a Between Subjects Design to assess differences between two experimental groups; one group receiving the news story and one receiving the children’s short story. Both stories were about climate change, which allowed the overarching content of the two testing groups to stay similar. We used Dr. Neff’s Self-Compassion test for our study as it has been used in studies before and allowed for easy analysis.
With this method, we were able to compare and analyze results from the pre-and post-test surveys between the children’s fiction and news group. We considered the pre-test results as baseline levels of self-compassion and the post-test results as influenced by the reading material - both tests were exactly the same. Our study took place over the course of one week and was administered entirely through email.
Data Analysis & Findings
Prepping the Data
One objective of this class was to introduce R, so we used the program to run our statistical analyses. Once the study was complete, we started cleaning up our data so it was ready for R.
Our first test in R was a Shapiro-Wilk Normality Test, so we could ensure that the data was normally distributed. We found the following p-value results:
Children’s Book: p = 0.96
News Story: p = O.98
Based on these results, we were able to assume normality for this data set. We also ran an outlier identification (no outliers found) and a variance test (equal variance assumed).
Running the main test
As we had a normal distribution for our data set, we ran a Student’s T-Test to test our hypothesis.
After running our T-test we were able to reject the null hypothesis, meaning that our hypothesis was correct and there is a positive effect of reading children’s fiction on a reader’s self-compassion levels.
Implications
Further Research
As we saw results with such a small sample size, more research regarding the effects of reading children’s literature on self-compassion should be conducted. Doing more research on reading and self-compassion could lead to greater understanding of how reading can effect a variety of different human emotions.
Reading as a tool
If the results of this study are repeatable with a much larger sample size, these findings could have a large impact on how mental health experts, therapists, and other individuals view reading as a coping tool. It could also impact early education to teach children about different emotions that will help them be a vital individual in society.
Constraints
Limited Research
During our literature reviews, most of the research we found on the impact of reading on emotions, had to do with things such as empathy or compassion. The literature on reading and self-compassion was almost non-existent. Although this was challenging, it actually helped in our decision to focus on self-compassion as our Dependent Value, as there was not a lot of previous work done.
Limited recruiting
Due to the short quarter, we did not have a lot of time for recruitment which led us to rely mostly on our own community. Although we still collected a lot of meaningful data, if we did this study again, we would want to expand recruitment to a more diverse pool from different communities.
Limited Oversight
Due to the pandemic still keeping us all online, it was nearly impossible for us to ensure that the participants were doing the steps of the activity in the order we had outlined for them. Hoping to counteract this, we made sure to highlight very clearly in our emails how we wanted them to go through the experiment.
Reflection
Thinking back
Thinking back, I wish that we would have been able to space out our initial self-compassion and the main activity so that participants do not have the previous survey still fresh in their mind. It would have been interesting to see if the results had been different if the time between the two surveys were longer. Due to this being a class project of 10 weeks, we were only able to have one week between the two surveys.
Thinking forward
This was my first experimental methods research project and I really enjoyed it. I liked figuring out how to best structure the study design and how to collect meaningful results from it. Going forward, I would really enjoy to work on another experimental study like this and let the numbers speak for themselves.