Emotional shifts in stories are assumed to contribute to narrative persuasion by enhancing engagement with the story. This effect might depend on the congruency of audiences' emotional experience to the emotions implied by the story. In two experiments with well-controlled story manipulations, we compared the persuasive effect of stories with…

In this article, I use the metaphor that readers journey to narrative worlds to review research that has spanned my career. In the first section, I consider the processes that enable readers to undertake these journeys as well as the processes that allow them to participate in the narrative worlds once they have arrived. In the second section, I…