Staying-at-Home with Tragedy: Self-expansion Through Narratives Promotes Positive Coping with Identity Threat

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic created a historic opportunity to study the link between identity threat and individuals’ temporary expansion of the boundaries of the self (TEBOTS) through stories. Concurrently, the relationship between eudaimonic entertainment processes and self-expansion, particularly feeling moved and self-awareness, was examined. A quasi-experiment was conducted with an online sample (N = 172) that was randomly assigned to watch either a tragic drama or comedy. Results showed that key TEBOTS predictions were largely confirmed for boundary expansion and the outcomes of narrative engagement and entertainment gratifications. Although identity threat was negatively associated with positive coping with the pandemic, this relationship turned positive when mediated by boundary expansion. Further, exposure to tragedy raised feelings of “being moved,” which, in turn, was linked to self-perceptual depth and expanded boundaries of the self downstream. The present findings suggest that self-expansion through story consumption could benefit viewers’ positive reframing of challenging life experiences.

The longitudinal influence of hedonic and eudaimonic entertainment preferences on psychological resilience and wellbeing

“…Given these important psychological functions of stories and narratives and the ubiquity of entertaining media, their relationship with psychological health and wellbeing is of great interest (Prestin and Nabi, 2020;Khoo et al, 2021). In fact, considerable evidence points at beneficial short-term effects of entertainment, such as recovery or stress coping (Reinecke et al, 2011;Rieger et al, 2014;Nabi et al, 2017).…”

Personal relevance and state empathy with a character facilitates self-disclosure in film viewers

“…There is a growing body of research on the positive effects of media (see Reinecke and Oliver, 2016;Raney et al, 2020) and narratives (e.g., Khoo et al, 2021) specifically. Previous studies show that exposure to narratives can activate skills and processes relevant to the successful navigation of interpersonal relationships, such as social cognition processes (Mumper and Gerrig, 2017;Rooney and Bálint, 2018), empathy (Mar et al, 2006), self-reflection (Khoo and Oliver, 2013), or prosocial behavior (Igartua and Barrios, 2012).…”