Search

The study compares the persuasive effect of two kinds of messages: informative and narrative, on people's intentions to engage in food safety practices at home. The narrative messages are designed such that they are counterfactual producing stories, this is, stories in which the protagonist suffers negative consequences for engaging in risky behaviors. The study also explores the effect of including, or not, statistical information about populations at risk for foodborne illnesses. 160 participants were randomly assigned to read a message that was either informative or narrative, included or not statistical information about food safety risk, and was about either using clean utensils or a food thermometer to check for meat being properly cooked. Results show that stories that induce counterfactual thought are not as succesful in the context of food safety as they have been in other risk domains, and that the inclusion of statistical information before them does not increase their persuasiveness. Implications for the use of narrative forms in food safety messages are discussed. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on studies of attribution and story realism it seemed plausible that people might try to mentally fill in information to explain an unexpected emotion expressed by a character in a story. In two earlier experiments unexpected emotions were consistently judged as less real. However, it seems likely that at least in some circumstances people try to make sense of incongruent emotions expressed by a character in a story. The current study explores one of those possible circumstances, when a reader is unfamiliar with a culture. Familiar vs. unfamiliar culture did make a difference. Unexpectedly the difference was for the story version in which no emotion was expressed. The result is interpreted in the context of earlier studies about the effect of typicality on judgments about realism. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study that looked at the effect of context on the perceived realism of women's body types. This is important both for understanding how depictions of women are understood and also to understand the role of context on perceived realism. Women with larger body types are underrepresented and presented negatively on television. It is possible that program context may influence perceived reality of various women's body types. Two experiments found that while the body type of an actress had little effect in a domestic setting, larger women were perceived as less realistic and less likely to get a television role if the program was in a professional setting.

This article presents experiments that looked at the effect of emotional congruency on realism, and whether that effect is the same for both positive and negative emotions. In these experiments when a character expresses an expected emotion the story seems more real than when a character expresses an unexpected emotion. This was most true when the incongruent emotion was the opposite of the expected, but was still true and quite strong even when the incongruent emotion was less extreme and of the same valence as the congruent emotion.

Considerable evidence indicates people make dispositional and situational attributions to explain the social actions people observe. Two experiments examine whether media stories influence perceptions of realism in a media story by providing dispositional or situational information about an action. The attribution literature suggests that people spontaneously generate dispositional information for negative stories and situational information for positive stories. The results here indicate that stories that supply the missing attributional information (situational for negative stories and dispositional for positive) are judged more real than stories that supply information congruent with the spontaneously generated information. Evidence is also presented for the psychological mechanisms for a person-reality effect. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social judgments about stories can influence perceived realism in complex ways. Earlier studies indicated that unexpected emotions are simply less real than expected emotions. There are several reasons to think the situation is not that simple. While the studies controlled for a number of variables, they may have over simplified emotional expression in stories. In addition, there appear to be different expectations about emotion for men and women and those expectations depend on the context. Using a complex multimessage design, this study examines the impact of emotion (anger, happiness), the response (over reaction/under reaction), the situation (achievement/interpersonal), the character's sex, and the participant's sex. The situation, the response, and the specific emotion had large, complex effects on perceived appropriateness and realism, but character sex and notions of sex role had less impact than expected. This study adds to a growing catalog of social judgments shown to influence perceptions of the realism of a story and to our understanding of the complex, multidimensional judgments people make about the realism of social interactions. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has long been assumed that movies can have an influence on moral development and moral thought. The content analysis presented here examines whether and how people who post informal reviews online think about moral issues related to the films, and how that fits with theories about moral development and the role of moral thoughts in entertainment. The results indicate that, in this context, conscious thoughts about moral issues are scarce, although they increase significantly when a movie is morally ambiguous. Most of the comments about moral issues reflect on the possible moral effects on others rather than on the self. This result casts some doubt on the assumption that films can be a tool for moral self-development. Other results show that moral comments about elements beyond the plot and characters (creators of the film, general audience and the world at large) are almost as frequent as those about the storyline, and that people use the level of moral complexity of a film to evaluate its overall quality. It would appear that the role of moral thoughts is more varied than previous theoretical models indicate. Future research in the area should perhaps incorporate considerations about moral ambiguity of a movie, moral thoughts beyond plot issues, and different roles that moral thoughts play in audience's interpretations of movies. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]