How psychological and descriptive narratives modulate the perception of facial emotional expressions: an event-related potentials (ERPs) study

TL;DR

This study explores how reading different types of stories affects brain responses to emotional facial expressions.

Contribution

It shows that narrative transport influences neural processing of emotions, particularly through internal simulation.

Findings

Reading modulated early brain responses to emotional faces regardless of narrative type.

Only psychological narratives showed a link between narrative transport and P100 amplitude.

Greater narrative transport correlates with enhanced internal emotional simulation.

Abstract

The aim of the present study was to investigate whether stories with high and low narrative transport exert different effects on neural activation in response to facial emotional expressions. Thirty-one participants were randomly assigned to two groups based on the type of story they read: psychological narrative with high narrative transport (6 women and 10 men; age M = 34.38 ± 8.77); descriptive narrative with low narrative transport (9 women and 6 men; age M = 24.07 ± 7.38). The electroencephalographic activity of the participants in response to emotional facial expressions (joy, anger, fear, sadness) was recorded before (T0) and after (T1) the reading task. The findings indicated that the reading task modulated the early brain response (P1, N170) to emotional facial expressions, irrespective of the narrative type. However, only in the psychological narrative group was the amplitude of the P100 found to be positively associated with the extent to which an individual was transported into the narrative. In summary, the findings appear to indicate that an increased degree of transport into the narrative is associated with a greater internal simulation process of emotions and mental states. This, in turn, modulates the perception of the real social world after reading.

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