Understanding readers’ imaginations could enhance mental health therapies

(Press-News.org) Embargoed until 19:01 EDT Tuesday 12 August 2025 / 00:01 BST on Wednesday 13 August 2025

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A new tool to understand how people imagine differently when reading could have potential implications for the treatment of mental ill health.

The ReaderBank Imagination Quiz has been developed by a team of researchers led by Durham University, UK.

The quiz identifies four “forces” of imagination - space and vision, voice and language, people models, and perspective.

These forces have strong and specific connections to mental imagery, immersion in a story, daydreaming, and intrusive thoughts.

This shows the complexity of people’s reading minds and what the researchers say is a radical diversity of imagination skills.

The researchers add that understanding how different people respond to reading could provide a greater insight into how their imaginations work.

This could eventually allow for mental health therapies to be better adapted to the individual.

The ReaderBank findings are being presented today (Wednesday 13 August 2025) at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.

The team stressed that this is an early study and that they hope to do more research to develop the ReaderBank Imagination Quiz as a tool that could enhance and supplement mental ill health treatments.

Lead author Professor Ben Alderson-Day, of the Institute for Medical Humanities and Department of Psychology, Durham University, said: “The diversity of imagination is about multiple senses, how we engage with and understand others and how we’re not always aware when we’re building imaginative worlds whilst reading.

“This is relevant when we start thinking about mental health, because there are lots of aspects of mental health which are all about thoughts, memories, and ideas coming to us, that we can't control.

“Lots of psychotherapy methods rely on the imagination, but we never screen people for what kind of imagination they have.

“This tool, which is nominally about reading, is about offering a window on that diversity of imagination.

“Our end goal is thinking how can we use these sorts of tools to inform more precise, more detailed pictures of how psychotherapy is going to work?”

The ReaderBank Imagination Quiz stems from ReaderBank – an ambitious attempt to use reading and book festivals to study the imagination and mental health in new ways.

The project is a collaboration between Durham University and the Edinburgh International Book Festival.

Researchers quizzed 867 people on their reading experiences across two Edinburgh International Book Festivals in 2023 and 2024. A third group took part online.

Participants were 18 or over, had read a fiction book in the last six months, and were fluent in English.

They completed questions about reading habits, including how much and how frequently they read books, preferred types of books or e-books, and most read genres.

Other questions were aimed at how people visualised what they were reading, such as faces and scenes, and how they experienced inner speech or physical and sensory feelings.

The quiz also looked at how conscious readers were of what they were reading and the impact this had on them.

They found a “radical diversity of imagination skills”. The researchers say that understanding this range of imagination could be used to refine treatments for similar traits in mental ill health.

ReaderBank will be continuing this year at Edinburgh with a new series of studies and a focus on “Repair”, the theme of the book festival. People can take part at www.readerbank.org.

Dr Wajid Khan, Head of Research at Southwest Yorkshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, said: “These research findings shine new light on the role the imagination and creativity can play in helping build, maintain and change cognitive schemas and wider psychological processes. 

“ReaderBank has far-reaching implications for the way we manage recovery and resilience in clinical mental health services.”

The research team included experts from Durham University’s Department of English Studies and the National Poetry Centre in Leeds. The work was supported by the Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities and funded by Wellcome.

Jenny Niven, Director of the Edinburgh International Book Festival, said: “We are delighted be a partner on Durham University's ReaderBank project.

“The Book Festival is a site for collaboration, innovation and creativity, and working with the ReaderBank team and our audiences over the last couple of years has given us a fascinating insight into our diverse audience of curious readers, and the different ways we engage with fiction.

“The team at the Book Festival is so excited to see how this might inform festivals in years to come.”

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