Readers unconsciously learn about emotion as they read fiction.

Extended reading is important; you can't improve emotion skills with a small burst of reading.

All genres of fiction can improve emotion skills.

When you curl up with a good book, you can lose yourself in another world. Reading is solitary, even antisocial, because you’re leaving your own world behind. But amazingly, reading fiction can improve your real-world social skills.

How Fiction Trains Your EQ

Many studies have found that reading fiction improves emotional intelligence, the ability to recognize and interpret the emotions of others from their facial expressions, voice, posture, and so on. Why? Fiction is full of characters’ emotions, and the experience of reading about them helps your emotional skills in the real world.

Fiction has two kinds of words that convey emotions. First, fiction contains emotion labels, like anger, disgust, and excitement. My colleagues and I found that fiction contains far more emotion labels than either speech or nonfiction writing. Second, fiction is full of words describing emotion expressions—behaviors like blush, yell, and laugh. These two types of words are key to describing how a character feels and acts in this fictional world. Readers can use these words and the broader context to infer emotional states of the characters.

Emotion labels and expressions provide a........

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