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

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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.