“Run for it!”: Viewers’ participatory responses to film narratives.

Abstract

The authors suggest that, as people experience narratives, they often generate mental responses that parallel responses they make when participating in real-world events. In 2 experiments, they used a think-aloud procedure to explore the range of such participatory responses that participants generated while viewing film excerpts. In Experiment 1, participants viewed film excerpts with sympathetic and unsympathetic characters. The authors used viewers’ responses to construct a taxonomy of participatory responses. In Experiment 2, they provided evidence that participatory responses are sensitive to narrative context. They manipulated the level of suspense for excerpts by providing or withholding information about potential negative outcomes and found that viewers generated more participatory responses during suspenseful than nonsuspenseful film excerpts. The authors propose that participatory responses play an important role in how people experience narratives and should be included within theories of narrative comprehension.

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