Transportation Across Media: Repeated Exposure to Print and Film

Abstract

“Transportation into a narrative world” is a state of immersion into a story (Green & Brock, 2000). Transportation entails imagery, emotional response, and attentional focus. Two studies investigated whether transportation was affected by the medium of story presentation, especially when the narrative was experienced for a second time (e.g., watching the movie version of a previously read story). Study 1 (N = 88) showed that people who read a novel before viewing the film version were more transported into the film compared to nonreaders. In Study 2 (N = 71) participants came to the lab on two separate occasions to either read a passage or watch a movie clip. Reading followed by watching provided the greatest transportation. Furthermore, high need for cognition individuals were more transported when reading, whereas low need for cognition individuals were more transported when watching a narrative.

Notes

1. A variety of techniques and approaches for adapting print to film have been covered in depth elsewhere (e.g., Giddings, Selby, & Wensley, 1990; Harrington, 1997). Details of the general print-to-film adaptation process are not our focus here.

2. There was no significant difference in the proportion of males and females who had read the book before seeing the movie, χ² = 1.92, p > .15. Males were more transported into the film than females, F(1, 86) = 5.96, p < .05 (M males = 4.33, SD = 1.02; M females = 3.78, SD = 1.05). However, there was no interaction between gender and book reading on transportation into the movie, F(3, 84) = 0.03, p > .50, and the transportation effects reported here did not change when controlling for gender.

3. Some participants may have read the first book in the Harry Potter series, which also would have increased familiarity with the Harry Potter universe. We did not explicitly ask about reading other Potter books due to space constraints. However, if individuals in our study had read the first book but not the second, this would have made it less likely that we would have observed any differences between the groups.

4. We replicated this study with theater viewers of Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (N = 70). The results were strikingly similar. The mean transportation score for those who had read the book, M = 5.35, was significantly higher than the mean of those who had not, M = 4.93, t(66) = −2.05, p < .05.

5. The reading-enjoyment results should be interpreted with caution because the experience of watching the movie may have affected individuals' recollections of reading enjoyment.

6. Previous (unpublished) research in our laboratory provided mixed evidence for the role of imagery ability in transportation into print versus film. In the prior experiment, participants (N = 74) either read or watched excerpts from Hunt for Red October (a thriller) or Goodbye, Columbus (a romance) in the laboratory. There was no significant main effect difference in transportation based on print versus film for either narrative. For Goodbye, Columbus, imagery propensity interacted with medium to influence transportation, B = −2.36, p < .06. Mental imagery propensity mattered for reading (participants high in imagery propensity were more transported and those low in imagery propensity were less transported) but not for watching. However, this interaction did not emerge for Hunt for Red October. Therefore, imagery propensity may not play a robust role in responses to narratives across media.

7. One of the general transportation questions, “The events in the narrative have changed my life,” was inadvertently omitted from the questionnaire.

8. Fifteen participants (equally distributed across conditions) reported having read or seen The Rainmaker before the experiment. These participants also reported not remembering the rest of the plot, and had seen the movie or read the book more than three years prior to participating. Therefore, they appeared to be responding to the excerpts as if they were new stories. Excluding these participants from analyses did not change the observed patterns (although the significance levels were somewhat weaker due to reduced power).

9. Although items asking about “vivid mental images” of characters are part of the transportation scale, in this context, asking about specific mental images of the characters (Kelly and Rudy) may lead to misleadingly high scores among viewers as compared to readers. That is, because the imagery is provided for viewers, they may endorse these items even without being strongly immersed in the narrative. We analyzed the transportation scale both with and without the two specific imagery items. Results generally did not differ, with the following exceptions. With the reduced scale, first session readers were marginally more transported (at Session 1) than watchers, F(1, 69) = 3.62, p < .07 (M reading = 4.68, SD = .58; M watching = 4.45, SD = .47). The marginal difference between reading and watching in the second session dropped to nonsignificance for the reduced transportation measure, F(3, 67) < 1, p > .20.

10. There was also a marginal main effect of second session condition (B = −2.84, p < .08) such that individuals who watched the narrative during the second session were slightly more transported than those who read the narrative.

11. There was no gender difference in transportation scores after the first session, F(1, 69) < 1, p > .20, but after the second session, male participants had lower transportation, F(1, 69) = 3.45, p < .05 (M females = 4.65, SD = .92; M males = 4.20, SD = .77). This effect appeared to be due to a failure of randomization rather than a gender difference per se; relatively more males were in the watch–watch condition than in any other condition. The transportation findings reported here remained unchanged when gender was used as a covariate.

12. As noted in the Introduction, it is possible that films may require a different type of effort from viewers: effort in decoding characters' motivations and emotional states from their actions and expressions. If so, this type of effort or ability may map on to some other individual difference, rather than the cognitive style differences tapped by the need for cognition scale. It is possible that emotional intelligence or chronic attention to social stimuli would be relevant variables to test this possibility.