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Reading and wellbeing: Exploring perspectives across the lifespan
Nicola Currie and Sarah McGeown of the University of Edinburgh's Literacy Lab explore the perceived impact of reading on people's wellbeing.
How does our relationship with books change across our lifetime? As part of the Reading and Wellbeing project, funded by Leverhulme Trust, researchers from the Literacy Lab(this link will open in a new window) at the University of Edinburgh, alongside the Scottish Book Trust and National Literacy Trust, have been exploring readers’ perceptions of the relationship between their fiction book reading and wellbeing, and the insights have been fascinating!
In interviews, we’ve asked children (aged 9–11), young people (aged 15–17), adults (aged 30–50), and older adults (aged 63–83) the same questions to explore similarities and differences across the lifespan, and we share some key findings here.
Emotional experiences
Fiction book reading can elicit a wide range of emotional experiences, from feelings of happiness, relaxation, excitement, reassurance, gratitude, tension, sadness, fear or nostalgia. These feelings can be elicited through the book content, or through personal memories which are prompted as we read, or as we reflect on the book after reading(this link will open in a new window).
Across the lifespan, readers reported a range of rich and diverse emotional experiences, with ‘negative’ emotions such as sadness or fear, sometimes still being reported as enjoyable:
I just love the thrill of it, I just love the magic…It just feels like I'm in another world.
It's peaceful. It's a way for me to just calm down and just get away from the world.
The way that that sentence was written terrified me…
It’s nice to, you know, recall your teenage years, when you get to 65, it seems such a long way away.
Connection
Fiction often reflects the social world we live in, and when reading, we often feel a sense of connection to the fictional world, whether to the characters, settings, or story events(this link will open in a new window). Reading can also prompt feelings of connection to others, as we learn more about others, or share and discuss books we have read. Here we share readers’ feelings of connection to the fiction world:
…When they tell you about their personal feelings and you can tell how much it actually relates to you. How, I know it's just a book, but it's it feels like sometimes just yourself.
I feel like I’d wanna be their friend [characters] if I ever met them.
Even though it's fiction, it does bring a sense of reality almost, something you can identify with, something you maybe know.
It was impossibly sad and you loved that kid [book character]. You just loved him, you know.
Personal growth
Reading fiction can also enrich us, it can improve our reading and language skills, and knowledge and understanding of the world, ourselves and others. Reading can empower us, inspire thinking, new ideas and ambitions, and expand our life experiences:
And it's just made me feel happy, sad, confused, question myself and, I think that's why I'm now at this stage that I can actually like, say my feelings out loud...
Even fiction books, just reading about different concepts and topics, it really helps to define what I enjoy and what I want to do in the future.
So sometimes themes will come up in fiction that makes me want to read further on the subject or it may pick up on aspects of something that I didn't know and I've learned.
I would say I went to India, I went to Africa, I went to, you know, there was all these countries I went to with all of these books.’
The relationship between our reading and wellbeing is fascinating, and complex. Often the positive experiences we have from reading result from the book content, but as readers we also bring so much of ourselves to the books that we read. We hope some of these insights resonate with your own reading experiences, and perhaps even make you think a little more about the enriching effects of reading fiction.
You can learn more about the Reading and Wellbeing project here(this link will open in a new window).