If you ever feel vaguely guilty about the vast amounts of television you watch, might I suggest you cling to the findings of this study, published last week in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts. In it, the authors claim that watching high-quality television dramas — things like Mad Men or The West Wing — can increase your emotional intelligence. That is, watching good TV makes you more empathetic.
如果你曾因看太多電視，心中隱隱感到愧疚，我建議你看完以下研究結果。這是上周發表于《審美、創造及藝術心理學》上的。其中，研究作者稱，觀看高質量的電視劇——如《廣告狂人》或《白宮風云》——可提高你的情商。也就是說，看優質電視節目讓你更能體察他人。

In the paper, the authors describe two experiments that led them to their pro-TV conclusion. In one, they asked about 100 people to first watch either a television drama (Mad Men or The West Wing) or a nonfiction program (How the Universe Works or Shark Week: Jaws Strikes Back). Afterward, all of the participants took a test psychologists often use to measure emotional intelligence: They're shown 36 pairs of eyes and are told to judge the emotion each pair is displaying. The results showed that the people who'd watched the fictionalized shows did better on this test than those who watched the nonfiction ones.
報告中，研究作者描述了兩個讓他們提出這一結論的實驗。其中一個實驗中，他們先讓100個人觀看電視劇（《廣告狂人》和《白宮風云》）或非虛構類節目（《宇宙解碼》和《鯊魚周：大白鯊的反擊》。然后，全部參與者接受一項心理學家常用于測量情商的測試：研究人員向他們展示36雙眼睛，并被要求判斷每雙眼睛表達的感情。結果顯示，在測試中，觀看了虛構類節目的人，比看非虛構類節目的人表現更好。

They tried this again, only switching up the programs (The Good Wife and Lost versus Nova and Through the Wormhole) and adding a control group, too: people who took the eye-reading test without watching any television first. Again, their results showed that the fiction viewers' empathy scores were superior, though the nonfiction viewers' scored higher on average than those who hadn't watched anything beforehand.
他們又試了一次，只播放《傲骨賢妻》、《迷失與新星》和《穿越蟲洞》這幾部電視劇，并加入控制組。控制組的參與者直接參加眼睛判斷測試，不看任何電視節目。他們的結果再次顯示，看虛構類節目的參與者情商分更高，而看非虛構類節目的參與者，得分也比不看電視的人高。

It's a similar finding to a widely reported 2013 study that claimed that reading literary fiction is linked to better scores on this empathy-measuring test. The authors of that study and this new one argue that a complex fictional narrative forces the reader or viewer to consider a problem from multiple perspectives; further, since not every character's emotion is explicitly spelled out, the audience must do some mental work to fill in those gaps, making a guess at the inner lives of the character.
這與2013年一項被廣泛報道的研究結果相似：閱讀文學小說與在情商測試中得高分相關。那項研究的作者和此項新研究的作者都認為，復雜的小說敘事，迫使讀者或者觀眾從多方面思考問題；另外，因為不是每個角色的情緒都明確地表達出來，觀眾必須通過一些腦力工作來彌補這些空白，揣測角色的內心活動。

That literary fiction study, however, was also widely critiqued for its methods. Specifically, the fiction the researchers chose for their study was by authors like Louise Erdrich or Anton Chekhov; the nonfiction, on the other hand, was one of three Smithsonian articles, with titles like "How the Potato Changed the World." I mention this not to speak ill of delicious tubers (I would never do that), but to point out that the nonfiction samples they chose weren't about people. No wonder the study subjects were better at reading human emotions when they'd just spent some time reading about human emotions. And this new study falls short in a similar manner: Is it really that surprising that people might be in a more empathetic state of mind after trying to figure out what is going on in Don Draper's head than they would be after watching a Shark Week show? What does that really tell us?
然而那項對文學小說的研究，也因其研究方法而廣受批評。尤其是，研究者為他們的研究所選的小說，是由像路易絲?厄德里奇和契訶夫這樣的現實主義作家所寫的。而他們所選的非虛構文學作品，是史密森雜志的三篇文章之一，題為《土豆是如何改變世界的》。我提這點不是在說土豆壞話（我永遠不會這么做的），而是為了指出，這些非虛構類文學作品不是關于人的。這也就難怪實驗者在讀完關于人情的作品后，能更好地理解人的感情了。這項新研究也有著相似的局限：人們在揣摩唐?德雷珀（《廣告狂人》主角）的腦子里想什么之后，比看完《鯊魚周》之后變得更能理解他人，這真的令人驚訝嗎？這到底告訴了我們什么？

Maybe not much, but if you're looking for an excuse to buckle down with some binge-watching now that the weather's turned, do what you will with this new research.
也許并沒有告訴我們什么。但如果你想趁現在天氣不太好，為全心投入某部電視劇找借口，那么你看完這個新研究之后知道該怎么做了吧。

Vocabulary

emotional intelligence: 情商；情緒智商
empathetic: 同感的；同情的
buckle down: 傾全力；開始認真從事
binge-watching: 追劇

英文來源：nymag.com
譯者：李天貴
審校&編輯：丹妮