Research indicates that the extent to which one becomes engaged, transported, or immersed in a narrative influences the narrative's potential to affect subsequent story-related attitudes and beliefs. Explaining narrative effects and understanding the mechanisms responsible depends on our ability to measure narrative engagement in a theoretically meaningful way. This article develops a scale for measuring narrative engagement that is based on a mental models approach to narrative processing. It distinguishes among four dimensions of experiential engagement in narratives: narrative understanding, attentional focus, emotional engagement, and narrative presence. The scale is developed and validated through exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses with data from viewers of feature film and television, in different viewing situations, and from two different countries. The scale's ability to predict enjoyment and story-consistent attitudes across different programs is presented. Implications for conceptualizing engagement with narratives as well as narrative persuasion and media effects are discussed.

This article offers a theoretical framework to explain circumstances under which perceptions of “unrealness” affect engagement in narratives and subsequent perceived realism judgments. A mental models approach to narrative processing forms the foundation of a model that integrates narrative comprehension and phenomenological experiences such as transportation and identification. Three types of unrealness are discussed: fictionality, external realism (match with external reality), and narrative realism (coherence within a story). We gather evidence that fictionality does not affect narrative processing. On the other hand, violations of external and narrative realism are conceived as inconsistencies among the viewer’s mental structures as they construct mental models of meaning to represent and comprehend the narrative. These inconsistencies may result in negative online evaluations of a narrative’s realism, may disrupt engagement, and may negatively influence postexposure (reflective) realism judgments as well as lessen a narrative’s persuasive power.

The concept of transportation into narrative (Green & Brock, 2002) is used to gain new insights into cultivation processes. A theoretical framework is developed where cultivation is seen as the result of a self-reinforcing interaction between persuasive and motivational effects of transportation: Repeated highly transportive experiences contribute to the overall cultivation effect by adjusting the viewers' worldviews after each exposure. At the same time, viewers are motivated to return to programming of a given genre because transportation is an enjoyable experience. Our study uses transportability as an indicator of repeated transportive experiences and seeks to test its validity and usefulness for cultivation research. Results indicate that transportability predicts transportation within specific viewing experiences. Although no linear moderation effects of transportability are found, the data suggest a nonlinear moderation. Genre-consistent attitudes held prior to exposure facilitate transportation, but transportation was not consistently related to increases in genre-related judgments after a single exposure. Limitations of the transportability measure to represent repeated transportive exposures are discussed.

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