"Human beings experience empathy intensely," as Suzanne Keen, PhD from Harvard University and Dean and Professor of English at Washington and Lee University (USA), argued at the University of Navarra. The expert was one of the main speakers at the symposium "Life Writing as Empathy: A Symposium on Narrative Emotions," organized by the Emotional Culture and Identity project of the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS), which Zurich Insurance finances. In total, thirty experts, from ten countries, participated.

In particular, Professor Keen referred to men and women's empathic response to reading: "It is true that they express the emotions they feel differently when they read and that they also engage differently. But this has more to do with culture than with biology."

"Although genre preferences point in different directions," she added, "I think that the type of link a male reader can have with a thriller can be likened to what a female reader experiences with a character driven story of one family."

Empathy towards fictional characters

With regard to the difference between how readers respond to a work of fiction and to texts based on real events, she stressed that, "fiction frees readers to feel a lot of empathy for characters, in part because they know that they belong to a fictional world and therefore are not going to ask for help, request financial support or expect altruistic actions on their behalf."

Suzanne Keen is Dean and the Thomas H. Broadus Professor at the University of Washington and Lee in the United States. Her research on emotion and cognition combine contributions from narrative theory, neuroscience, developmental and social psychology and the science of emotion.

Professor Keen gave these remarks at an ICS-sponsored symposium, which aimed to analyze empathy in biographical works, within the framework of emotions and emotional cultures, and was meant as an interdisciplinary dialogue using a variety of texts, such as memoirs, diaries, letters, films, documentaries, and online media.

Among other topics, the meeting addressed teaching empathy through literature, empathy and social identity (ethnicity, disability, gender, age and social class), representations of emotions related to empathy, acceptance and the reader's empathy, memory and empathy, and the ethics of empathy.

Other prominent speakers included Irene Kacandes, who earned her PhD from Harvard University and is currently a professor of comparative literature at Dartmouth College (USA) and Arthur Frank, who earned his PhD from Yale University and is currently professor of sociology at the University of Calgary (Canada).