Guided dreams: Shot scale and shifting perspectives in narrative engagement

Abstract

The numerous ways in which an audience can be mentally engaged with a narrative include a sense of presence in a scene, sharing the emotions or taking the perspective of a character, and generating involuntary autobiographical memories (IAMs) prompted by the story. Here, we use dynamic modeling to explore how these various thought modes fluctuate as a function of shot scale, defined as the perceived physical distance between the audience and story characters. N = 103 participants were randomly assigned to one of four continuous response measures while watching one of two television shows. Results demonstrate a positive relationship between closer shot scale and emotion sharing and a positive relationship between closer shot scale and perspective taking. Mixed evidence leads to a more tentative conclusion that closer shot scale may in some cases also increase IAMS and presence.