Empathy, as an interdisciplinary concept, usually studied within social and psychological context, plays an important role in consuming literature and fiction in particular.
To measure it, the following subscales are considered: Mar et al., in a study of 94 participants, identified that the primary mode of literature that increases empathy is fiction, as opposed to non-fiction.
Empirical evidence, moreover, proved that fiction yielded a higher chance to get an individual involved in a narrative, while non-fiction did not.
[5] Fiction requires the reader to imagine the characters' situations and conditions, a phenomenon called “perspective taking.
For example, poetry is a more popular form to invoke empathy in neurodivergent readers, and it has the capacity to teach about high sensitivity when it comes to human difference.