Empowering Stories: Transportation into Narratives with Strong Protagonists Increases Self-Related Control Beliefs.

Several studies have shown that narratives can influence readers' beliefs about themselves. In the present study, our goal was to investigate whether stories portraying a strong protagonist can positively influence recipients' beliefs of being in control of events in their own lives (self-related control beliefs). Experiment 1 showed that narratives in both written text and video form with protagonists displaying high versus low self-efficacy can, at least temporarily, affect recipients' own self-related control beliefs when they experience strong transportation into the stories.

Don't believe everything you hear: Routine validation of audiovisual information in children and adults.

Previous research has shown that the validation of incoming information during language comprehension is a fast, efficient, and routine process (epistemic monitoring). Previous research on this topic has focused on epistemic monitoring during reading. The present study extended this research by investigating epistemic monitoring of audiovisual information.

Argument Strength and the Persuasiveness of Stories.

Stories are a powerful means to change people's attitudes and beliefs. The aim of the current work was to shed light on the role of argument strength (argument quality) in narrative persuasion. The present study examined the influence of strong versus weak arguments on attitudes in a low or high narrative context.

Processing of positive-causal and negative-causal coherence relations in primary school children and adults: a test of the cumulative cognitive complexity approach in German.

Establishing local coherence relations is central to text comprehension. Positive-causal coherence relations link a cause and its consequence, whereas negative-causal coherence relations add a contrastive meaning (negation) to the causal link. According to the cumulative cognitive complexity approach, negative-causal coherence relations are cognitively more complex than positive-causal ones.

Can readers ignore implausibility? Evidence for nonstrategic monitoring of event-based plausibility in language comprehension.

We present evidence for a nonstrategic monitoring of event-based plausibility during language comprehension by showing that readers cannot ignore the implausibility of information even if it is detrimental to the task at hand. In two experiments using a Stroop-like paradigm, participants were required to provide positive and negative responses independent of plausibility in an orthographical task (Experiment 1) or a nonlinguistic color judgment task (Experiment 2) to target words that were either plausible or implausible in their context. We expected a nonstrategic assessment of plausibility to interfere with positive responses to implausible words.