If you ever feel vaguely guilty about the vast amounts of television you watch, might I suggest you cling to the findings of this study, published in Psychology of Aesthetics, 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.

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 TV drama (“Mad Men” or “The West Wing”) or a nonfiction program (“How the Universe Works” or “Shark Week: Jaws Strikes Back”). Afterward, 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” versus “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 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 fictional narrative forces the reader or viewer to consider a problem from multiple perspectives. Further, since not every character’s emotion is explicitly spelled out, the audience must do some mental work to fill in those gaps, making a guess at the inner lives of the character.

如果你因看太多电视心中隐隐感到愧疚，我建议你看看以下研究结果。这是发表于《审美、创造及艺术心理学》上的。研究作者称，观看高质量的电视剧——如《广告狂人》或《白宫风云》——可提高情商。也就是说，看优质电视节目让你更能体察他人。

报告中，研究作者描述了两个让他们提出这一结论的实验。

其中一个实验中，他们先让100个人观看电视剧（《广告狂人》和《白宫风

云》）或非虚构类节目（《宇宙解码》和《鲨鱼周：大白鲨的反击》。然后，全部参与者接受一项心理学家常用于测量情商的测试：研究人员向他们展示36双眼

睛，并被要求判断每双眼睛表达的感情。结果显示，在测试中，观看了虚构类节目的人，比看非虚构类节目的人表现更好。

他们又试了一次，让受试观看《傲骨贤妻》、《迷失》或者《新星》和《穿越虫洞》，并加入控制组。控制组的参与者直接参加看眼睛猜心情测试，不看任何电视节目。结果再次显示，看虚构类节目的参与者情商分更高，而看非虚构类节目的参与者得分也比不看电视的人高。

这与2013年一项被广泛报道的研究结果相似：阅读文学小说者倾向于在情商测试中得高分。

那项研究的作者和此项新研究的作者都认为，复杂的小说叙事迫使读者或者观众从多方面思考问题。另外，因为不是每个角色的情绪都明确地表达出来，观众必须通过思考来弥补这些空白，揣测角色的内心活动。

    Words to Learn 相关词汇

   【有同理心的】yǒu tónglǐxīn de empathetic sensitive, identifying with the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of others

    【情商】qíngshāng emotional intelligence skill in perceiving, understanding, and managing emotions and feelings