Do you want your children to grow up to become empathetic people?

Axar.az reports citing Daily Mail that if so, new research suggests that you should encourage them to read.

In a study measuring brain activity while people were reading in three different languages, researchers found that reading stories is a universal experience that may result in people feeling greater empathy for each others, regardless of a person's origin or language.

The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Southern California (USC), is a first for neuroscience.

The USC researchers found patterns of brain activation when people find meaning in stories, regardless or their language of origin.

They used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to map brain responses to narratives in three different languages - English, Farsi and Mandarin Chinese.

The study suggests that exposure to narrative storytelling can have a widespread effect on triggering better self-awareness and empathy for others, regardless of the language of of origin of the person exposed to it.

'Even given these fundamental differences in language, which can be read in a different direction or contain a completely different alphabet altogether, there is something universal about what occurs in the brain at the point when we are processing narratives,' said Dr Morteza Dehghani, the study’s lead author and a researcher at the Brain and Creativity Institute at USC.

To conduct the study, the researchers read through more than 20 million blog posts of personal stories using software developed at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies.

They narrowed these posts down to 40 stories about personal topics such as divorce or telling lies.

Then, the stories were translated into Mandarin Chinese and Farsi, and read by 90 American, Chinese and Iranian volunteers in their native language - while their brains were scanned by MRI.

The volunteers also answered general questions about the stories while being scanned.

Using a machine learning and text-analysis technique, as well as an analysis involving over 44 billion classifications, the researchers were able to 'reverse engineer' the data from these brain scans to determine which story the volunteer was reading in each of the three languages.