I'll start off with this one (hope it lands in the right place, I'm not au fait with all the functions yet), but it caught my eye, and I'd like to share the ideas with others. I know my own perceptions altered after reading Chekov, for example.
Want To Read Others' Thoughts? Try Reading Literary Fiction
Your ability to "read" the thoughts and feelings of others could be affected by the kind of fiction you read.
That's the conclusion of a study in the journal Science that gave tests of social perception to people who were randomly assigned to read excerpts from literary fiction, popular fiction or nonfiction.
On average, people who read parts of more literary books like The Round House by Louise Erdrich did better on those tests than people who read either nothing, read nonfiction or read best-selling popular thrillers like The Sins of the Mother by Danielle Steel.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/10/04/229190837/want-to-read-others-thoughts-try-reading-literary-fiction (http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/10/04/229190837/want-to-read-others-thoughts-try-reading-literary-fiction)
I do wonder where my "dirty old books" stand then; I dislike modern fiction though I do enjoy Tolkien and Hermann Hesse....relatively 'modern" to my way of thinking.
Greg