Literary Fiction and Empathy

After reading literary fiction, people react more adequately in social situations. This is something that I have never heard and am very interested to know more about. It is striking to me that what you read can have an impact on the way that you perceive life. How can specially literary fiction out of all genres make this difference? The writer of this article claims that the perspective is varied and it causes you to consider others emotions, which is comparable to real life conversations. Now I'm preparing to take the survey... Well unfortunately it is closed. Regardless, I can apply this myself and test to see if reading truly makes an impact in my life.