The role of emotional shifts and event-congruent emotions in narrative persuasion

故事有能力改变接受者的态度、信念和行为（叙事说服）。故事或叙述的影响力的潜在过程被广泛认为与经典的说服的两个过程模型中所概述的过程不同。接受者的吸收和他们与整个故事世界，特别是与故事人物的距离的减少被描述为促进故事影响的主要过程。关于运输、叙事参与或认同的实证研究强调了情感在叙事说服中的作用。叙事-从经典的希腊戏剧到今天的叙事性健康传播-包括暗示接受者情绪体验（情绪转变）在情绪质量和强度方面发生变化的事件。基于最近的理论，我们假设这些情绪变化是理解叙事说服的关键。拟议的研究的总体目标是澄清重演的叙事说服情绪转变的作用。我们计划提供一个实验测试的因果关系的作用，情绪变化的叙事说服的对比故事与情绪变化的故事，不包含一个情绪变化，但传达相同的有说服力的信息，并尽可能平行的实验故事。我们将讨论三种典型的叙事，其特征是特定的情感转变，从恐惧到救济的转变是典型的惊悚故事和恐惧呼吁（实验1），从悲伤到快乐的转变是典型的戏剧故事与快乐的结论（实验2），从快乐到悲伤的转变是典型的悲剧故事（实验3）。两个实验扩展了这一观点，提供了一个因果检验的假设，体验（而不仅仅是推断）事件一致的情绪是至关重要的叙事影响的情绪转变（实验4和7）。此外，两个实验研究减少加工的信念不一致的信息和强化加工的事件初始信息的认知机制负责的说服效果的情绪转变（实验5和6）。最后一个实验考察了这些认知机制对经历事件一致性情绪的依赖性（实验7）。拟议的研究的一个独特之处是，它侧重于在处理叙事过程中的认知活动和情感过程的在线测量，而不是只使用回顾性评估，如量表，要求接受者报告他们的经验，在叙事作为一个整体。情绪过程的同步测量将通过面部表情的计算机化评估和心理生理学方法来完成。眼动追踪测量将被用来跟踪认知过程，而故事的事件展开。

Stories have the power to change recipients' attitudes, beliefs, and behavior (narrative persuasion). The processes underlying the influence of stories or narratives are widely perceived to differ from those outlined in the classic two-process models of persuasion. Recipients' absorption and their lack of distance to the story world as a whole and to the story characters in particular have been described as main processes facilitating story impact. Empirical work on transportation, narrative engagement or identification emphasize the role of emotions in narrative persuasion. Narratives - ranging from classic Greek dramas to today's narrative health communication - consist of events that imply changes in recipients' emotional experience (emotional shifts) with respect to emotional quality and intensity. Building on recent theory, we assume that these emotional shifts are pivotal in understanding narrative persuasion. The overarching aim of the proposed research is to clarify the role of reenacting emotional shifts in narrative persuasion. We plan to provide an experimental test of the causal role of emotional shifts for narrative persuasion by contrasting stories with an emotional shift to stories that do not contain an emotional shift but convey the same persuasive message and are parallelized to the experimental stories as far as possible. We will address three prototypical kinds of narratives that are characterized by specific emotional shifts, the shift from fear to relief that is typical of thriller stories and fear appeals (Experiment 1), the shift from sadness to happiness that is typical for dramatic stories with a happy conclusion (Experiment 2), and the shift from happiness to sadness that is typical for tragic stories (Experiment 3). Two experiments extend this perspective by providing a causal test for the assumption that experiencing (rather than just inferring) event-congruent emotions is crucial for the narrative impact of emotional shifts (Experiments 4 and 7). Moreover, two experiments investigate reduced processing of belief-inconsistent information and intensified processing of event-initial information as cognitive mechanisms responsible for the persuasive effect of emotional shifts (Experiments 5 and 6). The final experiment examines the dependence of these cognitive mechanisms on experiencing event-congruent emotions (Experiment 7). A unique feature of the proposed research is that it focuses on the on-line measurement of cognitive activities and emotional processes during processing the narrative, rather than using only retrospective assessments such as scales that require recipients to report on their experience during the narrative as a whole. The concurrent measurement of emotional processes will be accomplished through a computerized assessment of facial expressions and through psychophysiological methods. Eye-tracking measures will be used to track cognitive processes while the events of the story unfold.