原著論文
ポジティブな文章を読むと気分が良くなるのか?
2017 年 59 巻 4 号 p. 161-171
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2017 年 59 巻 4 号 p. 161-171
We read books for entertainment(Hirayama 2015). Reading is motivated by expectations of experiencing positive emotions. However, Fukuda (2016) failed to observe positive changes in the feelings of the participants of an experiment who read a short positive story. As that result may have been because the materials were too short for any emotional changes to occur,the present study investigates the effect of reading a long positive novel on readersʼemotions.
In our sequence of experiments, the participants were university students. Two positive novels and two neutral textbooks about psychology were first selected in a pilot study. In the main experiment,we hypothesized that reading a long positive novel,but not a long neutral text,would elicit positive emotions within the readers. The results of a 2 x 2(valance:positive vs.neutral text x test period:pretest vs.posttest)mixed-design ANOVA revealed that participants felt better after reading the positive novels compared to reading the neutral texts. We discuss the implications of these findings for reading as a distraction strategy and for research on readersʼ emotions.
