@phdthesis{Winkler2023,
  author    = {Winkler, Julia},
  title     = {The Experience of Emotional Shifts as a Narrative Process: Investigating the Relationship of Emotional Shifts and Transportation and Their Roles in Narrative Persuasion},
  doi       = {10.25972/OPUS-32179},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-321794},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t W{\"u}rzburg},
  year      = {2023},
  abstract  = {Emotional shifts are often a fundamental part of the narrative experience and engrained into the schematic structures of stories. Recent theoretical work suggests that these shifts are key for narrative influence and are interconnected with transportation, a known mechanism of narrative effects. Empirical research examining this proposition is still scarce, inconclusive, and lacking measures that assess the experience of emotional shifts throughout a narrative to explain effects. This thesis aims to contribute to this research lacuna and investigates the link between emotional shifts, transportation, and story-consistent outcomes using different methods to measure emotional shifts in the moment they occur (Manuscript \#1 and \#2), and using various narrative stimuli (audiovisual, written, auditive). Manuscript \#1 uses real-time-response (RTR) measurement to examine the relationship of valence shifts experienced during film viewing with transportation and post-exposure self-reported emotional flow. Manuscript \#2 reports a pilot study and two experiments in which a self-probed emotional retrospection task is used to measure the number and intensity of emotional shifts during reading. I investigate the effect of reviews on transportation, the link between transportation and emotional shifts, and their respective associations with story-consistent attitudes, social sharing intentions, and donation behavior. In Manuscript \#3, narrative structures are manipulated. Two experiments examine the effects of audio stories with shifting (positive-negative-positive) vs. positive-only emotional trajectories on the experience of happiness- and sadness-shifts, transportation, and post-exposure emotional flow. Transportation was positively linked to valence shifts (M\#1), and the number and intensity of emotional shifts (M\#2), and emotional flow (M\#1, M\#3). In M\#3, transportation was predicted by shifts in happiness, but not sadness. Emotional flow was linked to shifts in happiness, sadness, and RTR valence (M\#1, M\#3). Emotional shifts and transportation were associated with social sharing intentions, but only transportation was linked to some story-consistent attitudes (affective attitudes in particular).},
  subject      = {Gef{\"u}hl},
  language  = {en}
}