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、信仰和行为(叙事说服)。人们普遍认为，故事或叙事的潜在影响过程与经典的说服两过程模型中概述的过程不同。接受者的全神贯注以及他们与整个故事世界，特别是故事人物之间的距离，被描述为促进故事影响的主要过程。关于交通、叙事参与或认同的实证研究强调了情绪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健康交流-由暗示接受者的情绪体验(情绪变化)在情绪质量和强度方面发生变化的事件组成。基于最新的理论，我们假设这些情绪变化在理解叙事说服方面是关键。这项拟议研究的主要目的是阐明重演情绪变化在叙事说服中的作用。我们计划对情感转移对叙事说服的因果作用进行实验测试，将故事与情感转移进行对比，这些故事不包含情感转移，但传达了相同的说服信息，并尽可能与实验故事平行。我们将讨论三种典型的叙事，它们以特定的情感变化为特征，从恐惧到解脱的转变是典型的惊悚片故事和恐惧诉求(实验1)，从悲伤到快乐的转变是具有幸福结局的戏剧故事的典型(实验2)，以及从快乐到悲伤的转变是悲剧故事的典型(实验3)。两个实验扩展了这一视角，为体验(而不是仅仅推断)事件一致的情绪对情绪变化的叙事影响至关重要的假设提供了因果检验(实验4和7)。此外，两个实验考察了信念不一致信息的减少加工和事件初始信息的强化加工作为情绪转移说服效应的认知机制(实验5和6)。最后的实验考察了这些认知机制对体验事件一致情绪的依赖性(实验7)。这项研究的一个独特之处在于，它侧重于在线测量叙事过程中的认知活动和情绪过程，而不是只使用回溯性评估，例如要求受试者报告他们在整个叙事过程中的经历的量表。情绪过程的同步测量将通过对面部表情的计算机评估和心理生理学方法来完成。当故事发生时，眼球跟踪测量将被用来跟踪认知过程。

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.