In a previous post I discussed Embracing Narrative Transportation as a way to enhance the impact of your personal stories. And while I enjoy writing articles about storytelling, I’ve been exploring AI (Artificial Intelligence) to broaden my research capabilities.

I have to say, it’s amazing to watch these Chatbots in action. They are fast, and comprehensive in their reach, but they don’t replace humans as they still don’t have human experiences that we have, but they are able to locate and analyze information faster than any human.

So I decided to see what some of the latest chatbots had to say about the topic of Narrative Transportation with regards to crafting impactful personal stories. In part two, I asked NotebookLM what it thought. While it’s a long article, if you have an interest in AI, it’s an interesting read.

Input:

As Google’s NotebookLM queries the sources that have been uploaded to a specific notebook, I added 42 sources that discussed some aspect of narrative transportation. Then I asked 8 questions, which are listed in the following text, along with the output from NotebookLM

Output:

Here’s what NotebookLM had to say:

Overview

The provided texts collectively explore the multifaceted nature and impact of narrative. Monika Fludernik‘s work offers a comprehensive introduction to narratology, defining narrative elements and theoretical frameworks for understanding storytelling across various media. Lisa Libby and Melanie Green examine the psychological phenomenon of narrative transportation, investigating how engagement with stories influences beliefs, attitudes, and self-perception, even in the face of conflicting information.

Helenq Bilandzic focuses on measuring narrative engagement, identifying its components and relationship to concepts like identification. Martin Payne’s “Narrative Therapy” discusses the application of storytelling principles in therapeutic contexts, emphasizing the power of personal narratives in shaping identity and facilitating change. Finally, Lucas Bietti and Kurt Braddock, along with Michael Dahlstrom and William Buchanan, investigate the adaptive functions of storytelling and the persuasive effects of narrative on beliefs and cognitive processes like recall and comprehension, highlighting the immersive “experience” of transportation into a story world.

Questions

(1) What are the core components and definitions of Narrative Transportation as described in the provided documents?

Narrative transportation is an experiential state of immersion in which all mental processes are concentrated on the events occurring in the narrative. It’s the process that enables narrative persuasion, occurring when a person becomes so immersed in a story that they feel as if they are truly experiencing it.

Here are some core components and definitions of narrative transportation as described in the sources:

• • Definition: Narrative transportation is defined as a convergent mental process where all mental systems and capacities become focused on events occurring in the narrative. It involves individuals becoming absorbed into a story world. This psychological state varies depending on the text or media product, the recipient, the situation, and interactions between these factors.

• Key Components: Several key cognitive and emotional components contribute to narrative transportation:
  • Focused Attention: Receivers become so focused on the story that they do not think about distractions in their environment. A high level of focus or attention to the narrative is considered a necessary but not sufficient condition for transportation.
  • Emotional Engagement (including Empathy): There is a strong emotional response to the story with empathy for the characters. Transportation involves empathy, where story receivers try to understand the experience of a story character, knowing and feeling the world in the same way.
  • Mental Imagery: Receivers have a mental image of the story in their heads or try to predict what might happen in the future of the story. Story receivers generate vivid images of the story plot, feeling as though they are experiencing the events themselves.
  • Cognitive Detachment from Reality (Suspended Reality/Loss of Access to the External World): When transported, story receivers lose track of reality in a physiological sense. They mentally leave the real world behind and become entirely focused on the story world, although recent perspectives emphasize this is a dynamic process. This also includes a lack of awareness of surroundings.
• Related Concepts and Distinctions:
  • Narrative transportation is distinct from a narrative itself, which is an antecedent of narrative transportation. Narratives are defined as a connected series of events that typically include the actions and experiences of one or more protagonists that are causally related.
  • While similar to other experiential constructs like absorption, flow, and immersion, narrative transportation has specific characteristics. Absorption is a personality trait, while transportation is temporary. Flow is more general, while transportation specifically entails empathy and mental imagery. Immersion is more related to aesthetic and visual elements, whereas transportation relies on a story with plot and characters. Identification emphasizes involvement with characters, while transportation concerns involvement with the entire narrative.
• Outcomes: Narrative transportation can lead to several outcomes:
  • Belief and Attitude Shift: Transportation can influence receivers’ beliefs, attitudes, intentions, and behaviors, aligning them with the story’s content.
  • Reduced Counterarguing: When engrossed in a narrative, the receiver is less likely to challenge the story’s content.
  • Story-consistent beliefs and favorable evaluations of protagonists.
• Factors Influencing Transportation: The degree of transportation depends on various factors related to the story (e.g., narrativity, quality, coherence, characters), the recipient (e.g., transportability, need for affect), the medium, and the situation. Narrativity, which includes content dimensions and structural features like a sequence of causally related events unfolding over time, contributes to transportation by enabling an easy flow of comprehension.

In essence, narrative transportation is a psychological state of deep engagement with a story, involving focus, emotion, imagination, and a temporary detachment from the real world, which can subsequently influence beliefs and attitudes.

(2) According to these documents, what factors contribute to or hinder an individual’s experience of Narrative Transportation?

According to the documents, several factors contribute to or hinder an individual’s experience of Narrative Transportation. These factors can be broadly categorized into story characteristics, recipient traits and individual differences, situational factors, and medium characteristics.

1. Story/Narrative Characteristics: These are features inherent to the narrative itself that can influence how easily a person becomes transported.

• Narrativity and Literariness: Stories with high narrativity, meaning they include protagonists with goals, ensuing conflicts, and follow canonical affective trajectories, tend to elicit stronger narrative transportation. Well-crafted, high-quality narratives are generally more transporting. Literariness can also contribute to transportation.
• Coherence: A story that provides clear and sensible links between story events, character actions, and other elements is more transporting.
• Character Development:Well-developed characters contribute to higher transportation. Identifiable characters, where the story receiver can clearly pinpoint the personas, facilitate transportation by allowing for vicarious experience of beliefs and emotions.
• Emotional Intensity and Range: Stories with a greater emotional range or intensity can be more transporting.
• Suspense and Dramatic Tension: The presence of suspense or dramatic tension can increase transportation.
• Psychological Realism (Believability):Even in fantasy settings, the plot and characters should be plausible and act like real people to enhance transportation. Narratives that lack verisimilitude (realism or the appearance of being true) tend to be less transporting. However, this realism refers more to psychological realism than literal similarity to the real world.
• Clarity and Ease of Comprehension: Narratives that are easy to read and understand facilitate transportation. Conversely, written narratives that are difficult to read, understand, or imagine tend to be less transporting.
• Vividness and Detail: Rich detail may make stories more transporting. Stories containing rich, concrete imagery can increase levels of transportation.
• Novelty: Foregrounding in a narrative can increase perceived novelty, potentially contributing to transportation.
• Story Line Appeal and Quality of Production: These are suggested as important text factors influencing transportation.
• Unobtrusiveness of Persuasive Subtext: When persuasive messages are presented subtly, transportation may be higher.
• Similarity of Characters with the Self (Homophily): Characters who are similar to the reader can increase transportation. Personally relevant stories also tend to be more transporting.
• Narrative Perspective: While third-person perspective stories can be transporting, there is some evidence that the first-person perspective might be particularly effective.
• Coherence of Narrative Elements: A series of interrelated events that constitute a developed narrative, where the reader relies on the author, and the author relies on the reader’s ability to interpret, contributes to the experience.
• Causal Information: Information that is part of the causal chain of the story may lead to greater engagement.

2. Recipient Traits and Individual Differences: These are characteristics of the individual reading or experiencing the narrative.

• Transportability: This is a generalized tendency toward being transported by a narrative. Individuals high in transportability are more likely to become transported. This trait involves subdimensions like suspense/curiosity propensity, emotional engageability, and ease of accepting fictional worlds.
• Need for Affect: Individuals with a higher need for affect (a tendency to avoid emotion-inducing situations) are more likely to be transported into narratives.
• Imaginative Engagement: A higher capacity for imaginative engagement is linked to increased transportation.
• Narrative Comprehension Ability: How well a person understands the story, characters, and conflicts can affect transportability.
• Tendencies Toward Mental Imagery Production: Individuals who are better able to imagine the events and characters in a narrative are more likely to be transported. However, individuals with a low ability to generate vivid mental imagery might be more transported by visual media like films than by texts.
• Tendency Toward Emotional Responding: Individuals with a greater tendency toward emotional responding may have higher transportability.
• Prior Knowledge: Familiarity with a story topic can increase transportation. Prior knowledge that makes it easier to understand and connect with characters can also make transportation more likely. However, if personal experience contradicts the story, transportation can be disrupted as individuals may adopt a critical mode of processing.
• Attention: Paying attention to a story is a prerequisite for transportation.
• Self-Concept Accessibility: The level of accessibility of an individual’s self-concepts upon entering a narrative world can influence experience-taking, which is related to transportation. High self-concept accessibility did not appear to increase distraction or reduce absorption but was associated with lower levels of experience-taking.
• Literary Expertise: Readers with literary expertise may process texts differently due to their memory representations, including genre expectations.
• Demographic Factors: Some research suggests that younger individuals and females may experience more narrative transportation. Education level has also been linked to transportation.

3. Situational Factors: These are elements of the environment or context in which the narrative is experienced.

• Pre-Narrative Instructions: Instructions given to readers or viewers before engaging with the narrative can affect transportation. For example, instructions to relax and enjoy the narrative can increase transportation, while instructions to focus on surface aspects like grammar can decrease it.
• Prior Expectations (e.g., Reviews): Positive expectations created by prior positive reviews of a story can encourage greater transportation. Conversely, negative reviews might hinder it.
• Distraction and Cognitive Load: Anything that distracts the individual or increases cognitive load can interfere with transportation.
• Co-viewing: The presence and reactions of other people while experiencing a narrative (e.g., watching a movie) can influence transportation and its effects.

4. Medium Characteristics: The format in which the narrative is presented can also play a role.

• Type of Medium: Different media (e.g., written, audio, video, virtual reality) can influence the extent of narrative transportation. For example, virtual reality stories may evoke stronger physiological responses.
• Features of the Medium: Elements such as music in video narratives can affect transportation. The sensory capabilities of a medium (e.g., VR haptic interfaces) can influence how stories can be told and experienced.
• Visual Narrativity: For visual narratives, the presence of setting, a focal actor, and elements for viewer resonance contribute to visual narrative transportation.

It’s important to note that these factors can interact with each other, and the experience of narrative transportation is often a dynamic process that can fluctuate over time.

(3) How does Narrative Transportation, as explained in these texts, affect an audience’s beliefs, attitudes, and emotions in relation to a story?

Narrative Transportation, as explained in these texts, significantly affects an audience’s beliefs, attitudes, and emotions in relation to a story by immersing them in the narrative world, leading to various psychological and persuasive outcomes. This immersion, characterized by focused attention, emotional engagement, and vivid mental imagery, has several key effects:

1. Belief Change:

• Reduced Counterarguing: When individuals are transported into a narrative, they are often less likely to critically evaluate the information presented and may have a reduced tendency to counterargue claims made in the story. This can lead to the acceptance of story-consistent beliefs.
• Perceived Realism: Higher levels of transportation can lead story receivers to perceive the story and its plot as more realistic and truthful, even if they know it is fictional. This perception of truthfulness can then prompt them to adopt story-consistent beliefs.
• Influence of Characters’ Beliefs: Strong feelings and connections formed with story characters during transportation can enhance the influence of those characters’ experiences and beliefs on the audience’s own beliefs.
• Memory Reinforcement: The mental imagery formed during transportation can be recalled later, potentially re-evoking the original communication and reinforcing story-relevant beliefs over time.
• Generalization of Lessons: Audiences tend to generalize lessons learned from transported narratives and apply them to real-life situations, even if the stories focus on specific individuals and events.
• Causal Information Acceptance: Information presented at causal locations within a narrative tends to be perceived as more truthful regarding the real world, and this effect can persist over time.

2. Attitude Change:

• Favorable Evaluations: Transportation can lead to more positive feelings and evaluations of sympathetic characters within the narrative.
• Story-Consistent Attitudes: The engrossing experience of narrative transportation can result in more positive attitudes towards the story itself and story-consistent attitudes toward the experiences described within it.
• Mediation by Affect and Cognition: Narrative transportation can cause both affective (emotional) and cognitive responses, which in turn mediate changes in attitudes. Higher transportation is associated with increased story-consistent affective responses and narrative thoughts, and decreased critical thoughts.
• Persuasion: Narrative transportation is a key mechanism of narrative persuasion, influencing changes in consumers’ attitudes and intentions. Individuals more transported into narratives often show more positive attitudes towards related topics, such as products or social policies.
• Reduced Resistance: Stories, particularly when transporting, can be less threatening than direct persuasive messages, helping to overcome resistance to attitude change.

3. Emotional Impact:

• Emotional Engagement: Transportation inherently involves emotional engagement with the narrative. Transporting narratives are effective partly because they evoke emotions.
• Vicarious Experience: Through transportation, audience members can vicariously experience the emotions of the characters, leading to emotional responses aligned with the narrative events.
• Emotional Flow: The pattern of emotional experiences throughout a story, including shifts in emotional tone and the creation and resolution of suspense, can help maintain audience interest and increase transportation.
• Intensity of Response: Greater levels of narrative transportation can cause story receivers to perceive the story as more realistic, leading to more intense and story-consistent emotional responses.
• Connection to Characters: Emotional connections formed with characters during transportation contribute to the overall emotional impact of the story.

In summary, Narrative Transportation acts as a powerful process that allows audiences to become deeply involved in a story world. This immersion reduces critical processing, enhances emotional engagement, and fosters connections with characters and the narrative, ultimately leading to shifts in their beliefs, attitudes, and emotional states that are often consistent with the story’s content and implications. This effect is distinct from more analytical forms of persuasion.

(4) Based on the uploaded documents, what are the key principles of Narrative Transportation that can be applied to crafting impactful personal stories?

Based on the uploaded documents and our conversation history, several key principles of Narrative Transportation can be applied to crafting impactful personal stories:

• Narrative Quality and Coherence: A well-crafted personal story should have a clear and logical flow of events. The connections between different parts of the story, including cause-and-effect relationships, should be sensible and easy to follow. Ensuring that the actions and motivations of the storyteller (and any other characters involved) are consistent will enhance the coherence.
• High Narrativity: Personal stories should possess strong narrativity, which encompasses both the content (the sequence of events and the individuals involved) and the discourse (how the story is told using literary devices). A compelling personal story will have identifiable elements of a story, such as a beginning, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution (even if implicit).
• Vivid Imagery: To facilitate transportation, a personal story should incorporate rich and descriptive language that allows the audience to form vivid mental images of the events, settings, and people involved. Engaging sensory details (what was seen, heard, felt, etc.) can significantly enhance this aspect.
• Emotional Engagement: Impactful personal stories evoke emotions in the audience. Sharing your own genuine emotions and describing events in a way that resonates emotionally with listeners or readers is crucial. The emotional arc of your story, including moments of tension, joy, sadness, or reflection, can contribute to greater transportation.
• Focused Attention: A well-crafted personal story will capture and maintain the audience’s attention. This can be achieved through compelling plot points, intriguing details, and a pace that keeps the audience engaged without overwhelming them.
• Identifiable Characters (Especially Yourself): Even in a personal story where you are the central figure, making yourself relatable and allowing the audience to understand your experiences and emotions will foster empathy and connection. Sharing your inner thoughts, motivations, and vulnerabilities can help the audience identify with you.
• Psychological Realism: While personal stories are factual, presenting them in a way that feels psychologically plausible – where the emotions and reactions feel genuine and understandable – can enhance transportation. Even when recounting unusual events, grounding the narrative in relatable human experiences is important.
• Personal Relevance and Similarity: When crafting a personal story, consider how it might resonate with your intended audience. Highlighting themes, experiences, or emotions that the audience can relate to or find relevant to their own lives can increase their level of transportation. Similarities between the storyteller and the audience can also lead to higher levels of transportation.
• Perspective: While not explicitly stated as a necessity, using the first-person perspective (“I”) in a personal story can naturally enhance the feeling of direct experience and foster a closer connection between the storyteller and the audience, potentially increasing transportation.

By thoughtfully applying these principles, individuals can craft personal stories that are not just accounts of events, but immersive experiences that can affect an audience’s beliefs, attitudes, and emotions, making the stories more impactful and memorable.

(5) What narrative elements or techniques, identified in these documents, are most effective in fostering Narrative Transportation in personal storytelling?

Based on the uploaded documents and our conversation history, several narrative elements and techniques are identified as being most effective in fostering Narrative Transportation in personal storytelling:

• Coherence and Narrative Quality: A personal story that flows logically, with clear connections between events, character actions, and other elements, is more likely to be transporting. When the cause-and-effect links are sensible, the audience can more easily become immersed.
• Strong Narrativity: This involves both the what (narrative content – the sequence of events and characters) and the how (narrative discourse – the literary devices used to tell the story). A well-defined sequence of events with relatable characters provides a foundation for transportation.
• Vivid Mental Imagery: Using rich and descriptive language that appeals to the senses helps the audience create mental images of the story world and events, a key component of transportation. Concrete details and sensory information make the story more engaging and immersive.
• Emotional Engagement:Stories that evoke genuine emotions in the audience are more transporting. Sharing your own emotions authentically and describing experiences in an emotionally resonant way allows the audience to connect with the story on a deeper level. The emotional arc of the story, including moments of suspense, joy, or reflection, also plays a crucial role.
• Focused Attention: While the storyteller primarily influences this through the above elements, crafting a story that captures and holds the audience’s attention is vital for transportation. Avoiding unnecessary digressions and maintaining a compelling pace can aid in this.
• Identifiable Characters (Especially the Teller): Making yourself and any other individuals in your personal story relatable and understandable fosters empathy and identification, which are closely linked to transportation. Sharing thoughts, feelings, and motivations can help the audience connect with your experience.
• Psychological Realism: Even when recounting extraordinary personal events, grounding the story in believable human psychology – ensuring that actions and reactions feel plausible – enhances transportation. The audience should be able to understand the characters’ (including your own) motivations and emotional states.
• Personal Relevance and Similarity: When the audience perceives the personal story as relevant to their own lives or identifies similarities between themselves and the storyteller or the situation, transportation is more likely. Highlighting universal themes or relatable experiences can bridge this gap.
• Perspective (First-Person):While not explicitly stated as a definitive rule in the sources, using the first-person perspective (“I”) in personal storytelling naturally creates a sense of immediacy and direct experience, potentially drawing the audience more directly into your narrative and fostering transportation.

In essence, crafting impactful personal stories that foster Narrative Transportation involves telling a well-structured and coherent story with vivid details that evoke emotions, allowing the audience to connect with the storyteller and experience the narrative in a way that feels real and relevant to them.

(6) Are there any limitations or potential drawbacks of relying on Narrative Transportation to create impactful personal stories, according to these sources?

Based on the uploaded documents and our conversation history, there are several limitations or potential drawbacks of relying on Narrative Transportation to create impactful personal stories:

• Distraction by Irrelevant Details: While vivid details are crucial for transportation, an overabundance of them, or details that are irrelevant to the main point of the personal story, can be a significant drawback. These details might obscure the relevant elements of the story and detract from the intended impact. Listeners or readers could become focused on less important aspects, potentially missing the core message or the intended emotional or attitudinal shift.
• Potential for Misinterpretation and Misapplication: If the audience becomes highly transported but fixates on tangential similarities between the story and their own lives, they might draw incorrect or unintended conclusions. This “distraction by details” could lead to decisions or perspectives that are not aligned with the storyteller’s intention.
• Risk of Perceived Manipulation: If a personal story is perceived as being overly crafted or manipulative in its attempt to induce transportation, it could backfire. Audiences might become aware of the persuasive intent, which can lead to increased skepticism and reduced effectiveness of the story. The sincerity and authenticity often expected in personal stories are crucial to avoid this perception.
• Ethical Considerations: Depending on the content of the personal story, high levels of transportation could raise ethical concerns. For instance, if the story inadvertently normalizes or glorifies harmful behaviors, a transported audience might be more susceptible to these negative implications. Accuracy, potential for manipulation, and the portrayal of oneself and others with respect are important ethical considerations.
• Focus on the Story Over the Message: The very elements that make a personal story highly transporting – engaging plot, vivid characters, and emotional resonance – might overshadow the specific belief, attitude, or behavior the storyteller intends to influence. The audience might remember the story and their emotional experience but not necessarily internalize the intended lesson or perspective.
• Individual Differences in Transportability: Not everyone is equally susceptible to narrative transportation. Factors like “transportability” (a person’s general tendency to become absorbed in narratives), prior experiences, and the situational context can influence how deeply someone is transported. Therefore, a personal story that is highly transporting for one person might have less impact on another.
• The Role of Critical Thinking: While transportation often reduces counterarguing, if the personal story contains inconsistencies or elements that strongly contradict the audience’s existing knowledge or beliefs, high transportation might not entirely suppress critical thinking. Instead, these inconsistencies might disrupt transportation and reduce the story’s impact.

In summary, while Narrative Transportation is a powerful tool for crafting impactful personal stories, storytellers need to be mindful of the potential for distraction through details, the risk of appearing manipulative, ethical implications, the possibility of the story overshadowing the message, and individual differences in audience responses. Carefully balancing the elements that foster transportation with a clear focus on the intended message and maintaining authenticity are key to mitigating these potential drawbacks.

(7) Can you identify any examples or case studies of successful personal storytelling within these documents that illustrate the principles of Narrative Transportation?

Based on the uploaded documents, there aren’t explicit, detailed examples or case studies of successful personal storytelling that are thoroughly analyzed to illustrate the specific principles of Narrative Transportation we have discussed. While the sources touch upon the power of narratives and their persuasive effects, the emphasis is often on broader categories of stories, such as public narratives, fictional narratives used in research, or the use of autobiographical storytelling in therapeutic contexts without specific examples dissected for their Narrative Transportation elements.

However, we can infer some potential examples and connect them to the principles based on the information provided:

• The “Shopping Trolley Soldier (John Mulligan)” mentioned in: This is referred to as a dramatic example of someone benefiting from writing therapy. While the specifics of Mulligan’s story and its telling are not detailed, its effectiveness in resolving emotional issues suggests that it likely employed several principles of Narrative Transportation. For example, to have a “dramatic” impact, the story likely had a degree of narrative quality and coherence, presented events in a way that evoked emotional engagement, and perhaps allowed for some level of identification or psychological realism for the reader to connect with Mulligan’s experiences. However, without more details, this remains an inferred example.
• The use of autobiographical stories in therapy described in: The text outlines how clients can be asked to choose significant autobiographical stories and clarify them through writing and discussion. The potential for these stories to be “helpful” and for clients to gain insights about their lives by reflecting on their own narratives suggests that when these stories are shared (even if primarily with a therapist), they can be impactful. For Narrative Transportation to occur in this context, the client’s ability to articulate their experiences with coherence, including vivid details of memories, and to convey the emotional significance of these events would likely be crucial. The therapist’s questions to help clarify the story could also enhance these elements. Again, no specific story is provided as a case study.
• Stories used in health communication research: While not strictly “personal” storytelling in the sense of an individual sharing their own life story, the reference to using storytelling strategies in health messages and the example of a video story about cervical cancer screening having positive effects implies that well-crafted narratives, even if based on others’ experiences or fictionalized for a purpose, can be impactful. These stories likely leverage principles like narrative quality, emotional engagement (perhaps through relatable characters), and the potential for identification to achieve their persuasive goals.

In summary, while the documents highlight the importance and effects of narratives, they do not offer specific, detailed examples of successful personal storytelling that are then explicitly analyzed to showcase how principles of Narrative Transportation were employed. We can infer that instances of impactful storytelling, whether in therapy or health communication, likely benefited from these principles, but the sources do not provide the detailed case studies requested.

(8) How do the different terms provided (Narrative Transportation Theory, Narrative Theory, Transportation Theory, and Narratology) relate to or differ from each other within the context of these documents?

Based on the provided documents and our conversation history, here’s how the different terms relate to or differ from each other:

• Narrative Theory is the broadest term, encompassing a wide range of approaches to texts that are considered to be, partially or wholly, narrative. It is described as a set of approaches to understand, analyze, and evaluate narratives across various forms, including texts, images, spectacles, and events. Narrative theory draws upon various disciplines like linguistics, semiotics, psychology, and cultural studies to study the forms, functions, and effects of narrative.
• Narratology is a specific branch or discipline within Narrative Theory. It is often referred to as the theory or science of narrative. Narratology aims to develop systematic frameworks and tools for analyzing narrative structures, elements (like story and discourse), and categories. The sources indicate that narratology has its roots in structuralism and has evolved into various schools of thought and approaches, including classical and postclassical narratologies. Mieke Bal defines narratology as “the ensemble of theories of narratives, narrative texts, images, spectacles, events; cultural artifacts that ‘tell a story'”.
• Transportation Theory (also referred to as Narrative Transportation Theory) is a psychological theory that focuses specifically on the experience of being immersed or “transported” into a narrative world. This theory examines the cognitive and emotional processes involved when individuals become highly engaged with a story, experiencing a sense of “going into” the narrative world. Key aspects of transportation include focused attention, imagery, and emotional engagement.
• The relationship between Narrative Theory and Narratology is that narratology is a core component of narrative theory. While narrative theory is the overarching field of study, narratology provides many of the analytical tools, concepts, and frameworks used within this field to understand how narratives function.
• Narrative Transportation Theory is a specific theory within the broader field of Narrative Theory, but it comes primarily from psychology and communication studies rather than literary studies, which have historically been central to narratology. While narratology might analyze the structural features of a story, Narrative Transportation Theory focuses on the psychological impact of engaging with that story, particularly its ability to transport the audience and potentially lead to persuasion.
• Transportation Theory and Narrative Transportation Theory appear to be used interchangeably in the provided sources. Both terms refer to the same psychological construct of being immersed in a narrative.

In simpler terms:

• Think of Narrative Theory as the entire field of studying stories.
• Narratology is a key set of theories and methods within narrative theory, focusing on the structure and workings of narratives.
• Narrative Transportation Theory (or Transportation Theory) is a specific psychological theory within narrative theory that explains how people become immersed in stories and the effects of this immersion, such as persuasion.

Therefore, while all these terms relate to the study of narrative, they operate at different levels of generality and come from different disciplinary perspectives. Narratology offers tools for analyzing narratives, while Narrative Transportation Theory explains a particular psychological experience of engaging with narratives.

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