Does Literariness Influence Negative Empathy? A Study on the Effects of Foregrounding on Readers’ Affective and Aesthetic Reactions

This study investigates how stylistic foregrounding influences readers’ narrative empathy with morally ambiguous narrators—thus offering empirical insight into the concept of negative empathy, a form of emotionally invested but ethically conflicted engagement. In a between-subjects experiment, 59 participants read either original or stylistically manipulated excerpts from Lolita and The Kindly Ones, rating their emotional and aesthetic reactions. Results show that original, foregrounded texts significantly enhanced state empathy—across affective, cognitive, and associative dimensions—compared to manipulated versions. However, empathic distress was unaffected by stylistic manipulation, being instead predicted by individual trait empathy. Mediation analyses confirmed that aesthetic appreciation partially accounted for the effect of foregrounding on state empathy, while fully mediating the (weaker) effect on empathic distress, thus supporting an aesthetic pathway for emotional alignment. Participants’ post-reading reflections reinforced these findings: readers of original texts more often reported closeness, immersion, and ambivalent feelings, while readers of manipulated versions expressed detachment and unease. Although moral judgments occurred in both groups, those reading the foregrounded texts more frequently offered justifications or mitigating interpretations of the characters’ disturbing behavior. Text-specific analyses revealed that The Kindly Ones elicited greater distress overall, suggesting that thematic content may exert a stronger influence on empathic distress than stylistic form. These findings offer empirical support for negative empathy as a morally complex and aesthetically mediated form of narrative empathy fostered by stylistic features, thus advancing theoretical and methodological approaches in empirical literary studies about the interplay between style and narrative empathy.