[Construction of the Literary Response Questionnaire for Japanese (LRQ-J)].

Readers may have various experiences while reading a narrative, such as imagining the world described in the narrative, empathizing with the protagonist, and thinking about the author of the narrative or the real world. Referred to as "reader response" in literary theory, these experiences are important topics in the study of a reader's interactions with a literary text. To investigate differences among individuals in the degree of openness to these experiences during narrative comprehension, we translated the Literary Response Questionnaire (LRQ) developed by Miall and Kuiken (1995) and selected 37 items from the original scale to develop a Japanese version (LRQ-J). This survey was administered to 497 undergraduate students. The results showed that all subscales of the LRQ-J had internal consistency. Respondents' scores showed significant correlations with fantasy proneness, imaginative involvement, imagery vividness, and ego-resiliency. The results suggest that the LRQ-J has sufficient reliability and validity. The psychological characteristics of experiences assessed by the LRQ-J are discussed.