Narrative Involvement with a Stigmatized Character: The Influence of Happy vs. Sad Endings on Narrative Processing and De-stigmatization

This dissertation examines how stigma labels and emotional arousal at story-ending impact narrative processing and in-group perception. In particular, the impact of a character's stigma label and affect aroused at story-ending on identification and its component dimensions is explored. This dissertation focuses on exploring the identification process because it is argued to be a key aspect of narrative involvement that can encourage de-stigmatization. Based on the perspective that positive affect can cue approach (Slovic et al., 2003), it is hypothesized that a happy-ending narrative and a non-stigmatized protagonist will correspond to greater overall identification compared to a sad-ending narrative featuring a stigmatized protagonist.;This dissertation also proposes that examining the separate components of identification may illuminate the distinct influences of stigma label and emotional arousal on aspects of character involvement. Furthermore, adding a perspective-sharing component to the identification construct may increase its predictive validity on in-group perception outcomes. More specifically, merged perspective with a stigmatized character, which includes perspective-sharing and empathic perspective-taking, is argued to be key to motivating in-group perception. Finally, this dissertation explores the notion that identification can function not only as a continuous online process, but also as a retrospective re-appraisal.;Participants (n=308) were randomly assigned to one of six conditions, where they read a short story that featured a protagonist who was either HIV-positive, bipolar, or had no stigma, and a story-ending that was either happy or sad. Afterwards, participants completed a post-test through MediaLab (Jarvis, 2009) where they answered explicit attitude measures about identification with the protagonist, empathy for the protagonist's stigmatized group, stigma attitudes regarding HIV/bipolar disorder, transportation into the narrative, perceived similarity to the protagonist, degree of liking the protagonist, overall narrative enjoyment, and affective arousal at story-ending. Finally, participants were asked to retell the story in their own words.;Results demonstrated that participants identified more with the protagonist when the story ended on a positive note, especially in the context of a character with bipolar disorder. In general, participants identified less with a stigmatized protagonist compared to a non-stigmatized protagonist. Mediation analyses revealed that there was a significant indirect effect of merged perspective (i.e. empathic perspective-taking and perspective-sharing combined) on in-group perception. However, merged perspective did not significantly mediate de-stigmatized attitudes. Examining the component dimensions of identification demonstrated supported for identification as a re-appraisal, in addition to being a continuous online process. More specifically, while the absorption/motivational component of identification remained consistent between conditions, the perspective-sharing component significantly differed depending on story-ending and stigma-label. These results indicate that while some elements of identification are continuously processed (i.e. understanding the characters motivations and goals and feeling absorbed in the plot), other components may be re-assessed at story-ending. In this particular instance, affect aroused at story-ending was enough to significantly impact retrospective perspective-sharing with the protagonist.