The result was the ”fiction feeling hypothesis,” which the research team describes as:
According to the fiction feeling hypothesis, narratives with emotional contents invite readers more to be empathic with the protagonists and thus engage the affective empathy network of the brain, the anterior insula and mid-cingulate cortex, than do stories with neutral contents.
For us non-scientists, it essentially means emotionally charged book passages → empathy with the book characters → brain engagement → getting lost in a book.
