Tracking Emotional Shifts During Story Reception: The Relationship Between Narrative Structure and Affective Responses

Varying emotional content guides audiences’ attention during story reception. This study explored audiences’ emotional responses to stories to examine how emotional flow is related to the narrative material in valence and structure. We investigated the match between textual and emotional valence trajectories and examined accompanying further immediate and retrospective affective responses. Responses were tracked to three auditory short stories of different genres (happy-ending story, tragedy, and thriller) over four plot units (introduction, complication, climax and end). Sympathetic and vagal activation were measured continuously. Valence, arousal, and emotional intensity were measured retrospectively. Textual valence trajectories acquired by sentiment analyses corresponded mostly to retrospective ratings of stories with textually clear content of happiness and sadness. Immediate and retrospective emotional responses corresponded evidently to structural narrative features such as the climax. We discuss our work as clarifying groundwork for future research on emotional flow that links textual analyses to emotional responses.