Narrative studies, and literary scholarship overall, are currently experiencing a renewed interest in the mechanisms behind readers’ affective and cognitive responses, especially empathy. Recent experimental research shows literary narratives to prompt empathy in the short and long term. However, it is unlikely that any particular text exerts the same affective and potentially edifying power indiscriminately on all readers, regardless of what Caracciolo (2014) terms “experiential background”. In our paper, we will review experimental and other empirical evidence on narrative processing in order to unravel which types of personal relevance are more likely to be impactful than others, which types of impact (e.g. aesthetic, therapeutic, persuasive) they have been found to generate, and where their power might become excessive or outright detrimental to reader experience.