Emotional shifts, event-congruent emotions, and transportation in narrative persuasion

Abstract

Emotional shifts in stories are assumed to contribute to narrative persuasion by enhancing engagement with the story. This effect might depend on the congruency of audiences’ emotional experience to the emotions implied by the story. In two experiments with wellcontrolled story manipulations, we compared the persuasive effect of stories with shifts in valence (from positive to negative to positive) to continuously positive story versions and examined moderating influences of event-congruent emotions and narrative transportation. The positive story versions were consistently more persuasive than the versions with emotional shifts. Transportation increased the persuasive effect of the stories, but only in audiences that listened to the shifting stories. In both emotional story trajectories, event-congruent emotional experience enhanced persuasion. We discuss our findings in terms of boundary conditions of the effect of emotional shifts in narrative persuasion.