My point was that literary character doesn't have to be an absolutely accurate depiction of the real people for it to (potentially) have the effect mentioned in

My point was that literary character doesn't have to be an absolutely accurate depiction of the real people for it to (potentially) have the effect mentioned in the study. If each character is just a representation of the author's perception of other people, it's still something new that the reader couldn't have known otherwise. >It's funny you brought up the Mona Lisa, a painting with an expression so strange there's little agreement about what emotion it's conveying at all. It was brought up to say that the quality (or lack thereof) of a subset of all the works has no bearing on the quality of the better works in an area. Of course, you won't gain any new insight on psychology of vampire nor people in love from Twilight. And on incomprehensibleness, well let's say that if people learn that human's emotion might in fact be a giant mess, that we're not particularly (ir)rational nor simple, that would still be some understanding, isn't it? :-)