Understanding Media Enjoyment: The Role of Transportation Into Narrative Worlds

2004/11/01 by Melanie C. Green, Timothy C. Brock, Geoff Kaufman +1 · 26 citations
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Media Influence and Health #Media Studies and Communication #Public Relations and Crisis Communication

paper · doi:10.1111/j.1468-2885.2004.tb00317.x

openalex publication_date 2004/11/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30

Abstract

“Transportation into a narrative world” is an experience of cognitive, emotional, and imagery involvement in a narrative. Transportation theory (Green & Brock, 2000, 2002) provides a lens for understanding the concept of media enjoyment. The theory suggests that enjoyment can benefit from the experience of being immersed in a narrative world, as well as from the consequences of that immersion. Consequences implied by transportation theory include connections with characters and self-transformations.

Citations

• Meetings of minds: Dialogue, sympathy, and identification, in reading fiction
• Entertainment?Education and Elaboration Likelihood: Understanding the Processing of Narrative Persuasion
• Presence, Explicated
• Advances In Experimental Social Psychology

Cited by

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• Learning Through Rewards: Priming and Identification as Psychological Mechanisms of the Effects of LGBTQ+ Narratives on Inclusive Attitudes and Behavioral Intentions
• Caught in a Dangerous World: Problematic News Consumption and Its Relationship to Mental and Physical Ill-Being
• Fictionality and Perceived Realism in Experiencing Stories: A Model of Narrative Comprehension and Engagement
• Deepfakes as narratives: Psychological processes explaining their reception
• The Social Experience of Entertainment Media
• Nostalgic appeal in prosocial deepfakes of deceased and living artists: effects on emotional engagement and credibility
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• Readers’ Engagement with Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway: From Knowing about Death to the Experience of Finitude
• Positive and Negative Effects of Monitoring Popular Films for Historical Inaccuracies
• Resurrecting Historical Figures: The Persuasive Power of Deepfakes versus Text-Based First-Person Narratives
• "I Would Not Be This Version of Myself Today": Elaborating on the Effects of Eudaimonic Gaming Experiences
• Experimental Evidence for Differences in the Prosocial Effects of Binge-Watched Versus Appointment-Viewed Television Programs
• Relating entertainment features in screenplays to movie performance: an empirical investigation
• The role of storytelling in advertising: Consumer emotion, narrative engagement level, and word‐of‐mouth intention
• Meeting George Bush versus Meeting Cinderella: The Neural Response When Telling Apart What is Real from What is Fictional in the Context of Our Reality
• Entertaining Beliefs in Economic Mobility
• Parasocial interactions with real and virtual influencers: The role of perceived similarity and human-likeness
• Toward a Theory of Entertainment Persuasion: Explaining the Persuasive Effects of Entertainment-Education Messages
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• The boundary between real and fictional others in the medial prefrontal cortex is blurred in lonelier individuals
• “Double Crap!” Abuse and Harmed Identity in Fifty Shades of Grey
• Do Multimedia Matter? Cognitive and Affective Effects of Embedded Multimedia Journalism
• This and That in the Language of Film Dubbing: A Corpus-Based Analysis
• Measuring Narrative Engagement
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Related

• Narrate, Act, and Resonate to Tell a Visual Story: A Systematic Review of How Images Transport Viewers
• The Social Experience of Entertainment Media
• Examining Four Processes of Audience Involvement With Media Personae: Transportation, Parasocial Interaction, Identification, and Worship
• Expanding Disposition Theory: Reconsidering Character Liking, Moral Evaluations, and Enjoyment
• The dimensionality and cross-cultural invariance of narrative transportability: evidence from 50 countries and 21 languages