The Experience of Emotional Shifts in Narrative Persuasion

Abstract

Recent theory on narrative processes suggests that changes in recipients’ emotional responses (emotional shifts) are characteristic of immersed story processing and precursors of narrative impact. In two experiments and a pilot study, a novel self-probed emotional retrospection task was used to measure emotional shifts. We examined the link between transportation and emotional shifts and the association of these processes with story-consistent attitudes, social sharing intentions, and behavior. We manipulated transportation via positive and negative reviews prior to story exposure. Consistent with theory, and across both experiments, we found that transportation was positively associated with the number and intensity of emotional shifts. Transportation was linked to affective-level attitudes in particular. While emotional shifts were not related to attitudes in Experiment 1, they were related to affective-level attitudes and social sharing intentions in Experiment 2. We further discuss the validity of emotional shifts measured through self-probed retrospections in light of the results of the presented studies.