Helen Norris is a final-year interdisciplinary PhD researcher at the Institute of Education, University of Reading. Following a 15-year marketing career and a role as a Research Assistant in Oxford University’s Department of Experimental Psychology, Helen channelled her interest in language, cognitive development, and mental health into doctoral research, using a blend of corpus linguistics and psychology. Holding a Classics degree from Oxford University and an MSc in Psychology from Oxford Brookes, her thesis, Fiction and Emotion in Adolescence, investigates how adolescent fiction acts as a socio-emotional training ground using a 2.4-million-word corpus curated from fiction titles read by 684 teenagers.
This research investigates whether teenagers miss important socio-emotional development when they stop reading fiction. Using a 2.4 million-word corpus compiled from books read by nearly 700 adolescents, it found rich emotional vocabulary and physical descriptions of emotions that may strengthen emotion recognition, emotional regulation, empathy, and adolescent mental health.