http://www.physorg.com/news119025453.html
Now, new research in the Journal of Consumer Research examines emotional melodrama and finds a significant difference between how men and women view stories about protagonists who overcome challenges through sacrifice and bravery. While women tended to prefer stories that seem to be true, men enjoyed stories more when they were specifically told that they are fictionalized.
“Providing explicit information that the story is make-believe may have enabled low empathizers (males in this case) to relax emotion norms and become more involved in the story, in turn resulting in more favorable evaluations of the entertainment,” explain Jennifer J. Argo (University of Alberta), Rui (Juliet) Zhu and Darren W. Dahl (both University of British Columbia). “The more empathetic a person is, the more s/he will be involved and immersed into the story and transported into the world of the narrative.”
