![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Prior research has focused on individual differences in how readers engage with narratives; however, much of this work has focused a tendency to become immersed or swept up in narratives. The purpose of the four studies reported here was to develop and validate a self-report measure tapping individual differences in a tendency to step back to think or imagine while engaging with narratives. The resulting trait Imaginative Engagement Scale (IES) contains four subscales (Coauthoring, Gap-Filling, Theory of Mind, and Reflection) and correlated with Transportability, Narrative Engageability, and Parasociability, as well as measures of media consumption. Across two studies, IES scores were more strongly related to Need for Cognition than existing measures, and no gender differences were found on the IES. In a final study, IES scores predicted story rating of and state transportation into a popular fiction story, over and above the variance explained by trait Transportability.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Supplementary Material
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website
Data availability statement
The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/nm4wh/.
Open Scholarship
This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data, Open Materials and Preregistered. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://osf.io/nm4wh/, https://osf.io/nm4wh/, and http://bit.ly/ImaginativeEngagementScale.