Table 1.
Demographic information of study participants.
Fig 1.
The effect of two weeks of daily picture book reading on empathy in 6-8 year-olds.
a) Boxplots depicting differences of emotional, cognitive, and total empathy scores across the two reading intervention groups. Total empathy scores were computed as the sum of the emotional, cognitive, and fantasy empathy scores. There were no statistically significant differences in any of the three empathy scores between the intervention (pause) reading group and the control (read through) reading group (Two-way Mixed ANOVA, emotional: p = .528, cognitive: p > .999, total: p = .520). Higher scores represent a presence of greater empathy. b) and c) Boxplots depicting differences of emotional, cognitive, and total empathy scores across the two occasions. Cognitive and total empathy scores statistically significantly increased from the initial visit to the follow-up visit, regardless of which reading intervention group the participants were assigned (Two-way Mixed ANOVA, p = .020* and p.024*, respectively). There were no statistically significant differences in emotional empathy scores between the two occasions, however (Two-way Mixed ANOVA, p = .888).
Fig 2.
The effect of two weeks of daily picture book reading and reflection questions on creativity (fluency and originality) in 6-8 year-olds.
a) Boxplots depicting differences of creativity (fluency and originality) scores across the two reading intervention groups. There were no statistically significant differences in either creativity score between the intervention (pause) reading group and the control (read through) group (Two-way Mixed ANOVA, fluency: p > .999, originality: p > .999). b) and c) Boxplots depicting differences of creativity (fluency and originality) scores across the two occasions. Both creativity types statistically significantly improved from the initial visit to the follow-up visit, regardless of reading intervention group (Two-way Mixed ANOVA, fluency: p < .001***, originality: p < .001***).
Table 2.
Descriptive statistics for Pause (Intervention) and the Read-Through (Non-Intervention) groups. Group means and standard deviations for empathy and creativity measures at initial and follow-up visits for both the pause and read-through groups, with combined group statistics provided for comparison.
Table 3.
Primary mixed ANOVA results. Results show significant main effects of occasion (initial vs. follow-up) for cognitive empathy, total empathy, creativity fluency, and creativity originality, with a significant treatment by occasion interaction for creativity fluency, indicating that children in the pause group showed greater improvements in creative fluency compared to the read-through group.
Table 4.
Primary cumulative link mixed effects model results for fantasy measures. Results show a significant treatment by occasion interaction for fantasy empathy ratings, indicating that children in the pause group demonstrated significantly greater improvements from initial to follow-up visits compared to the read-through group.
Fig 3.
The effect of two weeks of daily picture book reading and reflection questions on originality as a measure of creativity in 6-8 year-olds.
Scatterplot depicting the overall relationship between age groups and creative originality ratings. When including age as an additional moderator, older children did statistically significantly worse on creative originality compared to younger children across both occasions and both reading types (Three-way Mixed ANCOVA, p = .018) NOTE: Lower scores are more original.