Narrative Absorption and Similar Concepts: A Scoping Review and an Interdisciplinary Theoretical Exploration

IGEL2024
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:speech_balloon: Speaker: Federico Pianzola @fpianz

:classical_building: Affiliation: University of Groningen

Title: Narrative Absorption and Similar Concepts: A Scoping Review and an Interdisciplinary Theoretical Exploration

Abstract: Narrative absorption, presence, flow, immersion, transportation, and similar subjective phenomena are studied in many different disciplines, mostly in relation to mediated experiences (books, film, VR, games). Moreover, since real, virtual, or fictional agents are often involved, concepts like identification and state empathy are often linked to engaging media use. Based on a scoping review that identified similarities in the wording of various questionnaire items conceived to measure different phenomena, I categorize items into the most relevant psychological aspects and use this categorization to propose an interdisciplinary systematization.

Long abstract

Experiences mediated by technology (e.g. printed books, screens, and virtual reality) are studied across a variety of disciplines, often with little cooperation. Different theorizations, models, and empirical tools have been developed, resulting in a fuzzy agglomerate of related and overlapping concepts, like presence (Lombard et al ., 2015), flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990; Harmat et al ., 2016), and narrative absorption (Hakemulder et al ., 2017). A scoping review is a suitable method to identify and summarize the core aspects of these various concepts, since they are currently obscured by the heterogeneity of disciplines investigating them. I surveyed the questionnaires most used in empirical research regarding this kind of psychological phenomena and I categorized the items in each questionnaire based on their wordings, thus independently from the conceptual models within which they have been developed. Overlapping concepts have been formulated in different fields according to specific disciplinary interests and based on knowledge within each field, this review focuses on how language is actually used in questionnaire items, rather than on how concepts are formulated top-down and associated with corresponding linguistic expressions that become items of a questionnaire.

Results

Out of a total of 484 items, 308 (64%) have close similarities and overlapping of wordings.

Table 1. Categorization of items (n = 308) from presence, flow, game, and narrative questionnaires.

Categorization-presence-items
Categorization-presence-items1164Ă—1446 176 KB

In all questionnaires, the most frequently recurring items concern attention and the sense of time. The isolation from external thoughts and perceptions is the main characteristic of presence-related phenomena, and such disconnection from stimuli unrelated to the undergoing experience probably leads to an alteration of the sense of time. Despite the evolution towards broad psychological conceptions of presence (Baños et al ., 2000; Lee, 2004; Riva et al ., 2015), a review (Hein et al ., 2018) of the psychometric questionnaires used in VR research in the years 2016–17 found that the most used one is the Presence Questionnaire (Witmer & Singer, 1998), which heavily focuses on visual realism and naturalness of interaction. However, the broadest and most protracted collective effort aimed at clarifying how to measure presence (Hartmann et al ., 2016; Vorderer et al ., 2004) has excluded realism from the subdimensions of presence, keeping only “self-location” and “possible action” as core dimensions. Indeed, these two categories seem to be the two really specific to presence, since a comparison with non-mediated reality is also relevant for the “imagery” category, which concerns items related to narrative absorption. Inquiring about the vividness of imagery or about the realism of a VR scene is a way to check how similar the imagined/mediated experience is to a non-mediated one. Both realism and vivid imagery are outcomes that can be associated with presence, but they are not particularly helpful to explain the underlying psychological processes that bring to the emergence of a sense of presence.

Many questionnaires also take into account the possibility that perceiving the existence of other agents can affect our sense of presence or, more broadly, that we can have intense experiences when interacting with others or following their actions. With a growing degree of complexity, such perception goes from merely noticing the existence of others, to interacting with them, to emotional and cognitive ways of responding to and understanding others’ mental states. These groups of items, which I have associated with the concept of social presence , occur often together with spatial presence items and seem to entail it as the basis on top of which they can emerge. Indeed, they are all different expressions of a self-other relationship and can be conceptualized as forms of presence in co-participation. Analogously, questionnaires about flow experiences include items that I have here associated with spatial presence – and in some cases also items related to social presence – plus a specific group of questions regarding the perception of an experience as challenging. Similar wordings can be also found in items of narrative and game questionnaires.

Items that I specifically associated with the concept of narrative absorption regard imagery, the feeling of suspense triggered by the narrated events, and the comprehension of the content of the story, an aspect which can be connected to the sense of challenge of flow experiences, since the right match between the complexity of a story and the cognitive skills of the audience is relevant for narrative absorption. It is worth noting that questionnaires investigating narrative absorption include these three groups of items but also items related to spatial presence and social presence (with characters of a story), which can be considered subdimensions of narrative absorption. Given their metaphorical nature, items explicitly asking whether an experience elicited involvement, engagement, immersion, or absorption are not particularly useful for describing the psychological processes activated during the experiences they aim at qualifying. Moreover, the adjective “immersive” is used in VR research as a technical attribute of the medium – consistently with Sheridan seminal definition (Sheridan, 1992) – whereas in game and narrative studies it is a quality of the player or reader’s experience (Jennett et al ., 2008; Ryan, 2015; Stockwell, 2019).

Another popular but quite heterogeneous group of questions concerns the emotional impact of mediated experiences. Ten questionnaires investigate this aspect in slightly different ways, so it is hard to say whether emotional impact is a component of any of the presence-related phenomena or a secondary effect elicited by them.

Discussion

The recognition presented can be used to reflect on the extent to which wording similarities among items from different questionnaires actually result from similarities between the underlying conceptualizations. One possible outcome is a cross-disciplinary systematization of concepts, suggesting viable options for an interdisciplinary agreement about the core aspects of the psychological states elicited by mediated experiences. To sum up, attention and time distortion are common to all the considered phenomena, and spatial presence (space and agency) is the phenomenon with the narrowest scope, the core. Social presence and narrative absorption are phenomena of increasingly broader scope, each of them including the listed phenomena of narrower scope. Flow is a concept transversal to the other three, being more related to the balance between a person’s skills and the complexity of the stimulus, rather than to a specific psychological dimension.

The categorization proposed here can be used to further refine existing questionnaires and possibly encourage a convergence of different disciplines towards a use of the same items, so that insight coming from different fields could be used for the advancement of knowledge in specific areas. For instance, empirical research on narrative could benefit from using existing items for presence and social presence, without “reinventing the wheel” and focusing rather on refining how to measure dimensions like suspense and imagery. Moreover, a shared agreement on basic items will enable better and more informative meta-analyses, as well as comparative media studies, a kind of research that is strongly relevant for all the disciplines that I mentioned here, since only a comparison between experiences with different media can help to account for the specificity of presence and related phenomena.

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