看美剧竟能成就出一个更好的你?

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 last week 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.

如果你曾因看过巨多电视剧而有那么些许的愧疚，那我就要建议你去参考下这项研究的结果了。该研究上周在《心理学美学》、《创造》和《艺术》等杂志期刊上发表过。研究中，作者称看一些像《广告狂人》和《白宫风云》等电视剧能够提高人的情绪感知力。即，看一些优质电视剧能够让你对事物更加地感同身受。

In the paper, the authors describe two experiments. 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: 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.

文中，作者描述了两个实验。在一组实验中，主办者先让100个人看电视剧(《广告狂人》或者是《白宫风云》)或者是纪实节目(《宇宙解码》或者是鲨鱼周：鳄反击)。之后所有的参与者进行了一下测试，通常心理学家用这种测试测量情绪感知：测试者会看到36对眼睛，并要求判断每双眼睛中表现出来的情绪。结果显示，测试中看虚构电视剧的试验者比看纪实节目的测试者表现更好。

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 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.

这与2013年广泛报道的一项发现极为相似，2013年的研究称，阅读文学小说能够使人们在感性测试中获得较高的分数。该项研究的作者与此项新研究的作者称：复杂的虚构读物能够强迫读者或观众从多方面考虑问题;而且，由于不是每个角色的情绪都会很明确地表达出来，观众们就要思考以填补这些空缺，揣度人物角色的内心世界。