The Power of Black Panther to Affect Group Perceptions: Examining the Relationships Between Narrative Engagement, Narrative Influence, and Perceived Vitality of African Americans

Marvel’s Black Panther (2018) offered much discussion about the role of an entertainment narrative to influence moviegoing audience’s perceptions about African, African American, and Black experiences. Generally, entertainment narratives allow people to imagine themselves as different people, part of different worlds, and sometimes even living in different timeframes. By providing different perspectives, they can provide opportunities for understanding of and improved perceptions of others. The strength of these perspectives resides with the strength of the story’s ability to engage. The present study examines how engagement with the film’s narrative may be associated with perceived vitality of African Americans, and how this relationship may be mediated by the influence audiences perceive the narrative to have on others. The study provides two key findings. Generally, narrative engagement is associated with perceived vitality, through the perceived influence of the narrative on white audiences but not Black audiences. These associations seem to be driven by Black respondents, however, for White respondents, the associations are present when considering the narrative’s influence on Black audiences.

Aesthetic appraisals of literary style and emotional intensity in narrative engagement are neurally dissociable

Humans are deeply affected by stories, yet it is unclear how. In this study, we explored two aspects of aesthetic experiences during narrative engagement - literariness and narrative fluctuations in appraised emotional intensity. Independent ratings of literariness and emotional intensity of two literary stories were used to predict blood-oxygen-level-dependent signal changes in 52 listeners from an existing fMRI dataset. Literariness was associated with increased activation in brain areas linked to semantic integration (left angular gyrus, supramarginal gyrus, and precuneus), and decreased activation in bilateral middle temporal cortices, associated with semantic representations and word memory. Emotional intensity correlated with decreased activation in a bilateral frontoparietal network that is often associated with controlled attention. Our results confirm a neural dissociation in processing literary form and emotional content in stories and generate new questions about the function of and interaction between attention, social cognition, and semantic systems during literary engagement and aesthetic experiences.

Structure, Engagement, and Evolution

This chapter provides a structural description of movie units, defends the notion that movies have evolved in the direction of fitting better our capacities and preferences, and summarizes evidence that the evolved changes have encouraged narrative engagement by viewers. Arguments against any true evolution of cinema concern reproduction, genes, random variation and selection, fashion, progression, speciation, and directionality, and these are discussed and all but the means of reproduction countered. The chapter then summarizes results of the previous chapters about how narrative engagement is attained through sustained attentional focus, understanding the narrative, emotional commitment, and a feeling of presence. It also warns the reader that increased engagement does not mean better movies. Engagement is driven by the narration; the quality of the movie is surely driven by the narrative.

Neural signatures of attentional engagement during narratives and its consequences for event memory

As we comprehend narratives, our attentional engagement fluctuates over time. Despite theoretical conceptions of narrative engagement as emotion-laden attention, little empirical work has characterized the cognitive and neural processes that comprise subjective engagement in naturalistic contexts or its consequences for memory. Here, we relate fluctuations in narrative engagement to patterns of brain coactivation and test whether neural signatures of engagement predict subsequent memory. In behavioral studies, participants continuously rated how engaged they were as they watched a television episode or listened to a story. Self-reported engagement was synchronized across individuals and driven by the emotional content of the narratives. In functional MRI datasets collected as different individuals watched the same show or listened to the same story, engagement drove neural synchrony, such that default mode network activity was more synchronized across individuals during more engaging moments of the narratives. Furthermore, models based on time-varying functional brain connectivity predicted evolving states of engagement across participants and independent datasets. The functional connections that predicted engagement overlapped with a validated neuromarker of sustained attention and predicted recall of narrative events. Together, our findings characterize the neural signatures of attentional engagement in naturalistic contexts and elucidate relationships among narrative engagement, sustained attention, and event memory.

What Type of Body Shape Moves Children? An Experimental Exploration of the Impact of Narrative Cartoon Character Body Shape on Children’s Narrative Engagement, Wishful Identification, and Exercise Motivation

BackgroundThe incorporation of narratives helps to enhance children’s engagement in active video games (AVGs), thus increasing moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA). Specific narrative elements, such as the visual representation of the characters’ body shape, have been rarely manipulated to explore their role in modulating children’s narrative engagement (NE) and exercise motivation.ObjectiveTo investigate the effects of character body shape manipulation (overweight/obese, average, or athletic slim) on children’s narrative immersion (NI), NE, wishful identification (WI), as well as their mediating effect on AVG and PA motivation.MethodsChildren ages 8–12 years old (N = 87) were randomly assigned to watch a 15-min animated video (designed for an existing AVG) in which the main characters had an overweight/obese, or average∗, or athletic slim body shape (all other elements were identical). Children’s NI, NE, WI, and AVG and physical activity (PA) motivation were then assessed.ResultsControlling for social desirability, the analysis indicated that participants with a BMI of greater than the 75th percentile had a significantly higher NI, NE, WI, and PA motivation when video characters were set to the overweight/obese condition, than they did for video characters set to the average or athletic slim conditions. On the other hand, children of equal or less than the 75th percentile exposed to the average character body condition had a greater NE, WI, and PA motivation than overweight/obese or athletic slim conditions. A mediation analysis with structural equation modeling indicated that NE mediated the effect between character body shape and AVG and PA motivation.ConclusionNarrative cartoon characters that mirror the target participant’s body shape can increase NE, which in turn mediates AVG and PA motivation. Content producers should identify optimal strategies in character body shape design to encourage children of different weight status to participate in PA with engaging stories to maximize health narratives’ persuasive potentials.∗The term average in this sense is not in reference to the national average body weight, but rather an average of the body weights represented in conditions A and C.

What Drives Narrative Engagement With Music?

Although people across multiple cultures have been shown to experience music narratively, it has proven difficult to disentangle whether narrative dimensions of music derive from learned extramusical associations within a culture or from less experience-dependent elements of the music, such as musical contrast. Toward this end, two experiments investigated factors contributing to listeners’ narrative engagement with music, comparing the narrative experiences of Western and Chinese instrumental music for listeners in two suburban locations in the United States with those of listeners living in a remote rural village in China with different patterns of musical exposure. Supporting an enculturation perspective where learned extramusical associations (i.e., Topicality) play an important role in narrative perceptions of music, results from the first experiment show that for Western listeners, greater Topicality, rather than greater Contrast, increases narrative engagement, as long as listeners have sufficient exposure to its patterns of use within a culture. Strengthening this interpretation, results for the second experiment, which directly manipulated Topicality and Contrast, show that reducing an excerpt’s Topicality, but not its Contrast reduces listeners’ narrative engagement.

How Does Personalization in News Stories Influence Intentions to Help With Drought? Assessing the Influence of State Empathy and Its Antecedents

Personalized stories are a powerful tool for communicating about science, particularly when a scientific topic is complex or unfamiliar. One example of such a topic is drought, something many regions of the world face regularly. Like other environmental challenges, drought recovery efforts benefit from a mobilized collective response through prosocial action, including volunteering and donations. The objective of this study was to examine how storytelling about drought influences emotional responses and empathic processes that in turn contribute to prosocial action. Using data collected from an online survey (N = 249) with undergraduate students, the current study tests the hypothesis that, relative to non-personalized stories, personalized news stories about drought will increase audiences' cognitive and emotional responses, including perceived suffering, narrative engagement, and state empathy. In addition, this study examines how emotional responses to personalized news stories influence readers' intentions to donate to farmers suffering from drought. Results reveal that personalized news stories are more likely than non-personalized stories to increase readers' state empathy and perceptions of others' suffering. Perceived suffering was directly related to the affective and cognitive dimensions of state empathy. Narrative engagement (i.e., transportation) was also directly related to the affective and cognitive dimensions of state empathy and indirectly associated with intentions to donate to assist those suffering from drought. Affective state empathy was directly associated with donation intentions, suggesting that an emotional response to media portrayals of suffering may promote prosocial intentions. We discuss the potential implications for using personalized news stories about drought and other natural disasters to motivate prosocial action.

Stories Enlarge the Experience of Self

Temporarily expanded boundaries of the self (TEBOTS) proposes underlying motivations for engaging with stories. TEBOTS points out that fundamental human drives for agency, autonomy, and connectedness are imperfectly attainable. As a result, human beings turn to transcendent experiences that offer self-expansion, especially engagement with mediated worlds and the stories and characters they provide. TEBOTS provides unique hypotheses about how the self-concept relates to the selection, processing, and effects of media entertainment. Confirmatory evidence for TEBOTS shows that threats to the self can increase responsiveness to narratives, and that effects are attributable to a boundary expansion mechanism. Recent studies demonstrate that boundary expansion during media use can facilitate positive outgroup perceptions and attitude change. The TEBOTS framework also provides testable propositions regarding the influence of life stressors such as finance, health, and relationships on narrative engagement and enjoyment, carrying potential implications for narrative influence on stressed populations.

Fiction effects on social cognition

Social cognition, the skillset involved in interpreting the cognitive and affective states of others, is essential for navigating the social world. Research has indicated that reading about fictional social content may support social cognitive abilities; however, the processes underpinning these effects remain unidentified. This study aimed to examine the effect of narrative engagement on social cognition. A text pretest (N = 11), a manipulation pilot (N = 29) and full experiment (N = 93) were conducted. In the full experiment, the manipulation failed to vary levels of narrative engagement (transportation, identification and affective empathy) with a passage from a popular fiction text. A correlation analysis revealed positive associations between narrative engagement dimensions and social cognition. An exploratory between-groups analysis comparing reading to no-reading found a significant gain in explicit mental state attribution in the reading group, when controlling for demographic and dispositional differences.