was linked to better mental health and social capabilities, including the ability to perceive nuances in interpersonal relationships
this is mostly for fiction but reading helps people socially, emotionally, and helps to process information. The more we read the better we can communicate with one another.
James Carney, an associate professor at the London Interdisciplinary School and the lead author of a 2022 study on reading and mental health.
credentials
see more awareness that reading is a resource “for our health and well-being.”
So far gathering that reading improves mental health and brain development and that's the main points to creating urgency to make the readers care and be more engage with the text.
Jill Sonke — a co-author of the new paper and a director of the EpiArts Lab at the University of Florida,
their credentials
Research indicates that reading can have a wide range of benefits for educational attainment, reasoning and comprehension skills, imagination, empathy, mental health, cognitive health and more.
Its explain the "why" reading is important.
more than 20 percent of people surveyed had a child under 9 years old, only 2 percent of those surveyed read with a child — a finding that stayed largely flat throughout the study period but that could contribute to further declines in adult reading going forward, the researchers said.
Parents are reading less to their kids and how is this going to affect them later on?
the most highly educated people were more than twice as likely to read as the least educated, and high-income people were about 1.5 times as likely to read as low-income people.
so maybe earlier the speculation about economic pressure and economic standing correlate to how people are able to spend their free-time--probably a stretch
the journal iScience, relied on data from the American Time Use Survey, which asks thousands of Americans per year to describe in detail how they spent a day. Over the 20 years the researchers analyzed, more than 236,000 Americans completed the survey.
this is how many people did this survey and there's no specifics if this is at random or carefully selected based on economic standing, age, race, etc.
“The empathy that we feel for them is actually real, and these connections with characters can be ways that we can feel less alone, that we can feel socially and emotionally validated.”
psychological benefits
Further research would be needed to confirm those theories.
not factual so moving on...
the authors suggested some possible explanations
speculating
The decline in reading could have implications for Americans’ learning, relationships and overall well-being, the researchers said.
the cause for a decline in social interaction?
Daisy Fancourt, a co-author of the study and a professor of psychobiology and epidemiology at University College London.
Dr.Fancourt's credentials
didn’t explicitly account for e-books and audiobooks
so were only considering statics from print media specifically. Got it.
latest decrease “surprising,” given that the study defined reading broadly, encompassing books, magazines and newspapers in print, electronic or audio form.
there's an array of media to be read...so where's the data drawn from?
Researchers from University College London and the University of Florida examined national data from 2003 to 2023 and found that the share of people who reported reading for pleasure on a given day fell to 16 percent in 2023 from a peak of 28 percent in 2004 — a drop of about 40 percent. It declined around 3 percent each year over those two decades.
statics (logos)