Exploring Age Differences in Absorption and Enjoyment during Story Listening
, Vanessa C. Irsik 3, Matthew M. Bain 3, Ingrid S. Johnsrude 3,4 and Björn Herrmann 1,5Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Thank you for the opportunity to review the work entitled 'Exploring age differences in absorption and enjoyment during 2 story listening'.
I find the paper generally sound and the findings valuable.
However, major changes should be made, as well as some more minor ones.
Introduction:
page 2, line 49: You mention many concepts, but you provide no detailed explanation of these concepts. Please explain each where appropriate, in the introduction, as not all the readers will be acquainted with them. This is necessary to understand the next parts, as well as the entire study.
Materials and Methods:
Materials and Methods title should be changed to Methods. Subsections should be listed in the following way:
Participants
Materials and Procedures
Analyses
In Materials and Procedures please only write which materials you used and explain the process. Everything that has to do with the statistical analyses please put in the separate section, Analyses. And in it please explain how you analyzed each of the segments.
Accordingly, please restructure this entire section as there is now a mixture of information about story selection, mood assessment, etc. Be careful where you write about different things. For example, Story selection will be in the Materials and procedure section.
Page 4, line 138: you write that the effect of age on subjective hearing reports was assessed using Spearman's correlation separately... You can not measure the effect with correlation, rather only assume about the connection between the two. Please rephrase this.
Page 4, line 187: you write about the hypothesized levels of engagement. Who hypothesized this, how and where? Please explain. If this information is very crucial (e.g., general information how this is determined), please add it even in the introduction.
Page 6, line 203: In this section (especially if you call it materials and procedure) only write about which materials you used and explain the process. Everything that has to do with the statistical analyses please put in the separate section, Analyses. This is just another example of why it is needed to restructure the entire Method section.
Discussion
Try avoiding repeating the results, and connect your findings to some previous findings, while also making some novel statements, offer some new insights.
Page 14, end of Discussion: Please add some limitations of your study and offer ideas about future studies.
Conclusion
Conclusion is very repetitive. Instead of repeating what you wrote in the results and discussion, please conclude / give some practical advice, such as what does this mean for "real-life scenarios", what does it tell us about aging or about this hearing and comprehending processes, what practical implications stem from these findings and what can be explored further?
Page 6, line 228 (this is just an example, but it happens elsewhere, as well): For me it is very confusing to see the reference to the figures in the Method section, and to then need to scroll down to the Results to actually see the figures. Please refer to the figures near where they are, in the Results section. Here only mention which analyses you conduct(ed).
Author Response
Response to Reviewer 1
We thank the reviewer for their evaluation of our manuscript. We appreciate the insightful comments and criticism and believe they are helpful in improving our manuscript.
Below is a point-by-point response addressing the reviewer’s comments. All sections or line numbers refer to the revised manuscript within which all changes are tracked:
Reviewer comments to the authors are in italics, our responses are in regular type, and reproduced text from the manuscript is in regular, blue font.
Introduction:
page 2, line 49: You mention many concepts, but you provide no detailed explanation of these concepts. Please explain each where appropriate, in the introduction, as not all the readers will be acquainted with them. This is necessary to understand the next parts, as well as the entire study.
We have expanded on the explanation of the concepts presented in the introduction. The new section now reads as follows:
“Media, literary, and library research has extensively explored narrative engagement, and several metaphorical terms and theoretical concepts have been proposed to characterize the sensation of being “lost” in the world of a story [22], depending on the type of narrative materials encountered. These include “narrative engagement” in film [23], “absorption” [24] and “transportation” in textual narratives [3,25,26], and “immersion” [27] and “presence” [28] in video games and virtual reality. Encompassing multiple forms of experiences, narrative engagement can thus be understood as a psychological state in which an individual perceives “a story in an immediate, emotionally and cognitively intense fashion” [29].
Scale instruments to measure this unique, personal experience with narrative materials have been developed, among which the most rigorously tested and used is the Story World Absorption Scale [24], investigating the nature of the relationship between several of the concepts mentioned above. The Story World Absorption Scale (SWAS) is intended to be sensitive to various stimulus materials (e.g., different genres) and to predict the enjoyment outcomes of these. The SWAS comprises four main subscales: attentional focus (a feeling of deep concentration and focus), emotional engagement (feelings of sympathy and empathy and identification with characters), mental imagery of the story world (vivid, visual imagery that comes to mind and aids deeper immersion), and transportation (feelings of entering the story world while still being present in the actual world). The scale further includes an ‘enjoyment’ dimension, proposed as an outcome rather than an aspect of the absorption experience [24]”
Materials and Methods:
Materials and Methods title should be changed to Methods. Subsections should be listed in the following way:
Participants
Materials and Procedures
Analyses
In Materials and Procedures please only write which materials you used and explain the process. Everything that has to do with the statistical analyses please put in the separate section, Analyses. And in it please explain how you analyzed each of the segments
Accordingly, please restructure this entire section as there is now a mixture of information about story selection, mood assessment, etc. Be careful where you write about different things. For example, Story selection will be in the Materials and procedure section.
We have restructured the Methods section according to the reviewer’s suggestion. Moreover, a separate Analysis section has been created as proposed. The Methods section now reads as follows:
“2. Methods
Participants
Two hundred and sixteen individuals aged 20 to 78 years (M = 49.9, SD = 15) took part in an online experimental study. Of those 216 participants, 108 identified as female, 104 as male, and four identified with a different gender (not further specified). Participants’ age information and distribution across experimental conditions are displayed in Figure 1. Participants were recruited from the Amazon Mechanical Turk participant pool via CloudResearch (https://www.cloudresearch.com), an online crowdsourcing platform (previously TurkPrime [49,50]). All participants gave informed consent before participation and received USD 7 in remuneration after completing the study. The study was conducted according to the guidelines of the Declaration of Helsinki and the Canadian Tri-Council Policy Statement on Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans and was approved by the Research Ethics Board at the Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care.
Previous research suggests that data obtained through online experiments can be vulnerable to factors such as random and/or fraudulent respondents and lack of response reliability compared to laboratory research, resulting in low data quality [51–53]. However, appropriate quality checks can mitigate the low data quality issues such that data recorded online compared to in-lab yield similar results [54–58]. Several data quality measures and conservative exclusion criteria (e.g., attention checks and low performance on tasks) were implemented in our experimental procedures, previously used in Herrmann [59] and Irsik et al. [16]. Data from 82 additional individuals were recorded (i.e., in addition to the 216 useable datasets) but excluded from analysis for failing to meet one or more rejection criteria. Specifically, exclusions occurred when participants scored lower than 80% in an attention-check procedure during story listening (N = 40), correctly answered fewer than 70% of subsequent story-comprehension questions (N = 20), or reported that they were distracted during story listening (N = 5) (procedures are described in more detail below). Furthermore, five participants reported a history of a neurological disease, one participant reported being a non-native English speaker, six participants obtained an unexpectedly high digits-in-noise threshold (>5dB SNR), and two participants failed to complete the digits-in-noise perception task altogether.
Materials and Procedures
Story selection
A set of ten stories (~10 minutes each) of different types were selected for the current study. Recognizing that different stories may appeal to different people, we sampled stories from various genres and themes to ensure a broad representation of narrative experiences. All stories have been used in previous studies [6,16,60]. Five stories from the storytelling podcast The Moth (https://themoth.org) were chosen for high engagement: The Bounds of Comedy by Colm O’Regan (The Moth 1), Swimming with Astronauts by Michael Massimino (The Moth 2), Nacho Challenge by Omar Qureshi (The Moth 3), Alone Across the Arctic by Pam Flowers (The Moth 4), and Discussing Family Trees in School Can Be Dangerous by Paul Nurse (The Moth 5). Two stories adapted from print books were included as samples of moderately engaging: Wave by D.M. Ouellet (Story Book 1F and 1M) and Alibi by Kristin Butcher (Story Book 2F and 2M). Two versions for each of the two stories were recorded in-lab, one by a female and one by a male native English speaker (different female and male speakers for the two stories), resulting in four Story Book stories used in the current study. Finally, a 10-minute excerpt from the Sleep With Me podcast (http://www.sleepwithmepodcast.com) was included to represent a highly disengaging story [6,42]. For data analysis, the ten individual stories were grouped based on their hypothesized levels of engagement as described in [6], that is, The Moth (highly engaging), Story Books (moderately engaging), and Sleep Story (disengaging).
Story listening procedure and experience assessment
Participants used an internet browser on a computer or laptop to perform the experimental procedures. Participants were asked to use headphones during the study and completed a volume calibration by adjusting their device volume to a comfortable level while listening to pink noise. Each participant was randomly assigned to one of the ten spoken stories and was instructed to listen carefully and understand it as best as possible. After listening to each story, participants rated the 23 items of the SWAS [6,24]. All item statements are listed in Table 1. The statements were presented to each participant in randomized order, and they rated each on a 7-point scale anchored on 1 (strongly disagree) and 7 (strongly agree).
To identify individuals who might have been engaged in other activities during the experiment, additional attention tasks were administered. During story listening, a number between 0 and 9 appeared in the center of the screen approximately every 15 seconds (randomly selected ranging from 11 to 19 s). The number stayed on the screen for 2.2 s. Participants were instructed to press the corresponding number key on their keyboard as quickly as possible. Only responses within 2.2 seconds and of the correct number key were considered correct responses. Participants who missed or incorrectly responded to 20% or more of visual numbers were assumed not to be paying attention to the experimental procedures, and their data were excluded from the analysis (N = 40). After listening to the story, participants were asked ten multiple-choice, plot-specific questions with four answer options each to assess their general comprehension of the narrative (chance rate 25%). Participants who correctly answered fewer than seven of the ten comprehension questions were assumed not to be paying attention to the experimental procedures, and their data were excluded from the analysis (N = 20). Moreover, participants were explicitly asked if they were doing something else while listening to the story, such as checking their phone, opening other browser tabs, etc. Participants who indicated ‘yes’ to this question were excluded from the analysis (N = 5).
The experimental procedures were implemented using JavaScript/HTML scripts with jsPsych JavaScript libraries (v6.1.0; [61]). Experiment code and stimuli were stored at an online Gitlab repository (https://gitlab.pavlovia.org) and hosted via Pavlovia (https://pavlovia.org).
Hearing assessment
Participants’ subjective ratings of their general hearing abilities and problems were assessed on an 11-point rating scale in response to the question “How would you rate your general hearing abilities?” anchored on 0 (very poor) and 10 (very good) and the statement “I often experience hearing problems” anchored on 0 (strongly disagree) and 10 (strongly agree).
Participants’ objective hearing abilities were assessed using an adapted version of the digits-in-noise (DIN) test [62,63]. The DIN test has been used and validated for testing both in-lab [63–65] and remotely [62,66–69], and DIN thresholds correlate reliably with pure-tone audiological examinations performed in person (0.5-4 kHz; r > 0.7; [64–66]). Participants listened to digit triplets masked with 12-talker babble noise [70,71], after which they typed the digits they heard in the order they had been presented. The signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) was manipulated by varying the spoken digits relative to the level of the babble noise. Twenty-six randomly generated digit triplets from 1-9 (onset-to-onset interval: 0.85 s) were presented at 26 SNRs (range: -15 dB to +15 dB; step size: 1.2 dB). The babble masker lasted 3 seconds, and the sequence of digits started 0.5 seconds after babble onset. Each participant completed two practice trials with high SNRs, followed by the 26 test trials [72]. A trial was considered correct if all three digits were typed in the order they were presented.
Mood assessment
To evaluate participants’ mood and its relation to story absorption and enjoyment, five positive (“contented,” “pleased,” “joyful,” “cheerful,” and “happy”) and five negative (“dissatisfied,” “sad,” frustrated,” “low-spirited,” and “depressed”) adjectives were adapted from the “Hedonic Tone” factor of the UWIST Mood Adjective Checklist (UMACL) [73]. Each scale item/adjective was rated in terms of how much it reflected the current feelings of the participants on an 11-point scale ranging from 0 (not at all) to 10 (very much).
Analyses
Data analyses were conducted using MATLAB (MathWorks) and JASP [74] version 0.16.4 software. Significant main effects in ANOVAs were followed up by posthoc comparisons using the Holm procedure [75]. Effect sizes for ANOVAs and t-tests are reported using omega squared (ω2) and Cohen’s d (d), respectively.
Age was treated continuously in most statistical analyses, but three age-group categories were used for intuitive assessment of effects and visualizations: younger adults with a mean age of 30.7 years (age range 20-39), middle-aged adults with a mean age of 51.3 years (age range 40-59), and older adults with a mean age of 65.7 years (age range 60-78).
Story listening and experience
Rating scores on the 23 items of the SWAS were linearly re-scaled to range from 0 to 1, facilitating interpretation. For each participant, ratings were separately averaged across absorption and enjoyment items. To assess the overall influence of story type and age on absorption and enjoyment, we first conducted two-way analyses of variance (ANOVAs), separately for absorption and enjoyment ratings, using Story Type (three levels: Sleep Story, Story Book, The Moth) and Age Group (three levels: Younger, Middle-aged, Older) as between-participants factors.
Separate linear regressions were calculated to analyze the effect of age as a continuous variable and to identify the factors that predict absorption and enjoyment. Explanatory variables included Story Type, Age, Gender, DIN threshold, and Mood. Gender was included because differences in narrative engagement between men and women have been reported previously [76]. The DIN threshold was included to examine whether hearing abilities affect story-listening experiences. Finally, Mood was included as a predictor to investigate whether mood effects previously observed for engagement and story involvement for written materials [46,47] could be extended to auditory materials.
Hearing
For subjective ratings, Spearman’s correlation was used to investigate whether age is related to the subjective hearing abilities, separately for general hearing abilities and hearing problems. For the DIN test, a logistic function was fit to the DIN data as a function of SNR, and the resulting 50% threshold was used as a dependent measure. The relationship between age and the DIN threshold was investigated using the Pearson correlation.
Mood
For each participant, mood scores were averaged across items, separately for positive and negative mood items. An overall mood score was calculated by subtracting the mean rating of negative items from the mean rating of the positive items (i.e., a high overall mood score resulted from a high positive mood rating and a low negative mood rating).
Identification of most discriminatory SWAS items
To explore which items of the SWAS scale discriminate best between stories designed to be engaging and those designed to be disengaging, responses for individual items of the SWAS (including enjoyment) were averaged across participants, separately for each story type. Averages for individual story types were overlaid to visualize the degree to which each item contributed to the experiences with the stories. To investigate the sensitivity of individual items further, we calculated, within item, the mean differences between The Moth and Sleep With Me and the Story Book and Sleep With Me story types. We sorted items by the magnitude of the difference from the Sleep With Me story.
Factor analysis
Factor analyses were conducted to investigate whether the four SWAS dimensions (established for written materials) can be observed for listening experiences. Procedures closely followed those described previously [24]. Factor analyses focused on data from the engaging stories, that is, The Moth stories and Story Book stories (overall N = 190 participants/datasets). Principal components analyses were calculated using oblique rotation (Promax) and maximum likelihood estimation with all items of the SWAS (excluding enjoyment items since they are not part of the four-dimensional SWAS). The overall Measure of Sampling Adequacy derived from the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin test was 0.936, and Bartlett’s test was significant (p < .001), indicating that the data were adequate for factor analyses [77–79]. Internal consistency of the SWAS items was acceptable (Cronbach α = .95).
First, an exploratory factor analysis was calculated using the eigenvalue criterion 1 to determine the number of factors [80,81]. A second exploratory factor analysis was calculated with a predetermined factor number of 4, reflecting the number of dimensions of the original SWAS [24]. This second analysis examined whether individual items load with the original dimensions. The item selection criterion was a primary loading greater than .45 [24].”
Page 4, line 138: you write that the effect of age on subjective hearing reports was assessed using Spearman's correlation separately... You can not measure the effect with correlation, rather only assume about the connection between the two. Please rephrase this.
We have rephrased this sentence, and reproduced the text below:
“Hearing
For subjective ratings, Spearman’s correlation was used to investigate whether age is related to the subjective hearing abilities, separately for general hearing abilities and hearing problems. For the DIN test, a logistic function was fit to the DIN data as a function of SNR, and the resulting 50% threshold was used as a dependent measure. The relationship between age and the DIN threshold was investigated using the Pearson correlation.”
Page 4, line 187: you write about the hypothesized levels of engagement. Who hypothesized this, how and where? Please explain. If this information is very crucial (e.g., general information how this is determined), please add it even in the introduction.
A section in the Introduction has been added, explaining the hypothesized levels of engagement of the 10 stories. This section is reproduced below:
“Additionally, stories are complex and can vary in their capacity to be engaging [37,38]. Prior studies have included a wide variety of story materials written and produced to facilitate different types of engagement and absorption across demographics. Specifically, episodes from the podcast series The Moth [39] have been used as examples of highly engaging materials [6,16]. The Moth podcast features spoken stories about human experiences and life events. Stories are intended to create “a unique, intimate, and often enlightening experience” for the listener [39]. Spoken versions of young adult fiction print books described as “high-interest, low-reading level” [40,41], using a simple vocabulary and linear plot lines, have been used as examples of moderately engaging stories [16]. In contrast, episodes from the Sleep With Me [42] podcast have been included as examples of disengaging story materials [6]. The series is described as “The podcast that puts you to sleep” [42], letting the listener “forget your problems and progressively gets more boring until you fall to sleep” [43]. Characterizing the experiences of people from different ages listening to stories may benefit from using stories associated with varying levels of engagement to increase external validity and limit concerns about generalizability due to single-stimulus sampling [44]”
Page 6, line 203: In this section (especially if you call it materials and procedure) only write about which materials you used and explain the process. Everything that has to do with the statistical analyses please put in the separate section, Analyses. This is just another example of why it is needed to restructure the entire Method section.
A separate Analysis section has been created, as described above.
Discussion
Try avoiding repeating the results, and connect your findings to some previous findings, while also making some novel statements, offer some new insights.
Page 14, end of Discussion: Please add some limitations of your study and offer ideas about future studies.
We have added a Limitations and future directions section. The section reads as follows:
“Limitations and future directions
The findings of the present study should be interpreted in light of certain limitations. First, conducting the study online introduces potential variability in participants’ listening environments, which we attempted to control through exclusion criteria and attention checks described earlier. However, we cannot entirely rule out the impact of uncontrolled environmental factors on participants’ absorption and enjoyment.
Moreover, it should be mentioned that all stories used in this study were presented in clear speech, without noise masking. Speech listening under ideal conditions is relatively effortless across ages, and previous research has demonstrated that, among healthy, younger adults, engagement in story listening appears to be unaffected by moderate background masking noise [6,16,60]. However, it is uncertain whether older adults with hearing loss appropriate for their age perceive and rate absorption and enjoyment similarly when masked by, e.g., multi-talker babble. Examining the effects of different listening conditions, such as varying levels of background noise and the use of different narrative delivery methods, would provide deeper insights into the engagement processes across different demographics, especially older adults.
While our study primarily focused on how mood affects absorption, it was beyond the scope of our research to investigate whether this relationship is bidirectional, i.e., whether engaging deeply with a narrative can improve mood. Understanding this dynamic can help in designing more effective therapeutic interventions, educational tools, and engaging content that leverages the power of storytelling to enhance emotional well-being and should be explored.
Self-reported absorption through a scale measurement tool may not accurately reflect actual cognitive and emotional engagement. A recent study by Richardson et al. [95] comparing self-report and physiological measures of narrative engagement in spoken stories and movie clips found that self-reported engagement was higher for movie watching, compared to listening of spoken versions of the same stories, whereas physiological measures of engagement (heart rate, temperature, and electrodermal activity) showed the opposite, i.e., increased engagement during listening [95]. This suggests that, although self-reported scales like the SWAS are useful, they could perhaps be complemented with physiological data. Future studies may consider incorporating both subjective self-report measures and objective physiological measures to capture a comprehensive picture of narrative engagement.
Although our factor analysis with four factors showed approximate convergence with the findings by Kuijpers et al. [24], we should highlight that our study was not originally designed with factor analysis as a primary objective. While we achieved a reasonably large sample size, the distribution of participants across different story types and demographic groups was not optimized for factor analysis. Ideally, future factor analyses would ensure a more balanced and targeted sampling strategy to enhance the robustness of the findings. Additional research is, therefore, required, including larger and more diverse populations and materials spanning more genres and narrative styles”
Conclusion
Conclusion is very repetitive. Instead of repeating what you wrote in the results and discussion, please conclude / give some practical advice, such as what does this mean for "real-life scenarios", what does it tell us about aging or about this hearing and comprehending processes, what practical implications stem from these findings and what can be explored further?
We have included perspectives on the applicability and implications of our study for future research and real-life settings, such as care homes and hearing treatment. The Conclusion section is reproduced below:
“The current study aimed to explore how individuals of different ages experience absorption in and enjoyment of a variety of spoken stories and to assess the ability of the Story World Absorption Scale to capture such experiences. Our study demonstrates that listening to spoken stories produces analogous absorption and enjoyment experiences to those observed for narrative reading along the scale dimensions of Attention, Mental Imagery, Transportation, and Emotional Engagement and that people across ages engage with and experience such materials in similar ways. We further showed that a positive mood predicts the degree to which a person feels absorbed by and enjoys a spoken story. The findings suggest that age-related hearing changes do not necessarily diminish the capacity to engage with and enjoy narrative content. For older adults, particularly those experiencing hearing loss, engaging with well-produced spoken narratives can be an effective way to maintain cognitive stimulation and social engagement. We encourage future research to identify the specific auditory features, such as narrative style, vocal delivery, and story content, that will maximize listener engagement. Overall, the current study provides a foundation for using spoken narratives in hearing research. Naturalistic speech stimuli, such as those used in this study, offer a realistic and effective means of studying speech perception and comprehension across different age groups. Researchers can build on these findings to explore how narrative engagement varies with different hearing conditions and interventions”
Detail comments
Page 6, line 228 (this is just an example, but it happens elsewhere, as well): For me it is very confusing to see the reference to the figures in the Method section, and to then need to scroll down to the Results to actually see the figures. Please refer to the figures near where they are, in the Results section. Here only mention which analyses you conduct(ed).
References to figures (except to Figure 1) have been removed from the Methods section and appear only in the Results section.
Reviewer 2 Report
Thank you for the opportunity to review the article with the title - Exploring age differences in absorption and enjoyment during story listening. The study is interesting and addresses a very topical topic in the field of psychology.
Recommendations:
We recommend adding the following subsections to the Discussion section - Practical implications and Limitations of the study.
Conclusions - to be completed with some conclusions with practical implications in relation to the relevant results of the study and future research directions
No suggestions.
Author Response
Response to Reviewer 2
We thank the reviewer for their evaluation of our manuscript. We appreciate the insightful comments and believe they are helpful in improving our manuscript.
Below is a point-by-point response addressing the reviewer’s comments. All sections or line numbers refer to the revised manuscript within which all changes are tracked:
Reviewer comments to the authors are in italics, our responses are in regular type, and reproduced text from the manuscript is in regular, blue font.
Thank you for the opportunity to review the article with the title - Exploring age differences in absorption and enjoyment during story listening. The study is interesting and addresses a very topical topic in the field of psychology.
Recommendations:
We recommend adding the following subsections to the Discussion section - Practical implications and Limitations of the study.
We have added a subsection to the discussion section which now reads as follows:
“Limitations and future directions
The findings of the present study should be interpreted in light of certain limitations. First, conducting the study online introduces potential variability in participants’ listening environments, which we attempted to control through exclusion criteria and attention checks described earlier. However, we cannot entirely rule out the impact of uncontrolled environmental factors on participants’ absorption and enjoyment, and our results may not be equivalent to those obtained through in-person testing.
Moreover, it should be mentioned that all stories used in this study were presented in clear speech, without noise masking. Speech listening under ideal conditions is relatively effortless across ages, and previous research has demonstrated that, among healthy, younger adults, engagement in story listening appears to be unaffected by masking conditions such as multi-talker babble [6,16,60]. However, it is uncertain whether older adults with hearing loss appropriate for their age perceive and rate absorption and enjoyment similarly when masked by, e.g., multi-talker babble. Examining the effects of different listening conditions, such as varying levels of background noise and the use of different narrative delivery methods, would provide deeper insights into the engagement processes across different demographics, especially older adults.
While our study primarily focused on how mood affects absorption, it was beyond the scope of our research to investigate whether this relationship is bidirectional, i.e., whether engaging deeply with a narrative can improve mood. Understanding this dynamic can help in designing more effective therapeutic interventions, educational tools, and engaging content that leverages the power of storytelling to enhance emotional well-being and should be explored.
Self-reported absorption through a scale measurement tool may not accurately reflect actual cognitive and emotional engagement. A recent study by Richardson et al. [95] comparing self-report and physiological measures of narrative engagement in spoken stories and movie clips found that self-reported engagement was higher for movie watching, compared to listening of spoken versions of the same stories, whereas physiological measures of engagement (heart rate, temperature, and electrodermal activity) showed the opposite, i.e., increased engagement during listening [95]. This suggests that while self-reported scales like the SWAS are useful, they should perhaps be complemented with physiological data. Future studies should consider incorporating both subjective self-report measures and objective physiological measures to capture a comprehensive picture of narrative engagement.
Although our four-factor analysis showed approximate convergence with the findings by Kuijpers et al. [24], we should highlight that our study was not originally designed with factor analysis as a primary objective. While we achieved a reasonably large sample size, the distribution of participants across different story types and demographic groups was not optimized for factor analysis. Ideally, future factor analyses would ensure a more balanced and targeted sampling strategy to enhance the robustness of the findings. Additional research is, therefore, required, including larger and more diverse populations and materials spanning more genres and narrative styles.”
Conclusions - to be completed with some conclusions with practical implications in relation to the relevant results of the study and future research directions
We have included perspectives on the applicability and implications of our study for future research and real-life settings, such as care homes and hearing treatment. The Conclusion section is reproduced below:
“This study aimed to explore how individuals of different ages experience absorption in and enjoyment of a variety of spoken stories and to assess the ability of the Story World Absorption Scale to capture such experiences. Our study demonstrates that listening to spoken stories produces analogous absorption and enjoyment experiences to those observed for narrative reading along the scale dimensions of Attention, Mental Imagery, Transportation, and Emotional Engagement and that people across ages engage with and experience such materials in similar ways. We further showed that a positive mood predicts the degree to which a person feels absorbed by and enjoys a spoken story. The findings suggest that age-related hearing changes do not necessarily diminish the capacity to engage with and enjoy narrative content. For older adults, particularly those experiencing hearing loss, engaging with well-produced spoken narratives can be an effective way to maintain cognitive stimulation and social engagement. We encourage future research to identify the specific auditory features, such as narrative style, vocal delivery, and story content, that will maximize listener engagement. Such insights could be applied in therapeutic settings, including using engaging audiobooks or storytelling sessions to improve mood and mental well-being among older adults and those in care settings. Finally, the study provides a foundation for using spoken narratives in hearing research. Naturalistic speech stimuli, such as those used in this study, offer a realistic and effective means of studying speech perception and comprehension across different age groups. Researchers can build on these findings to explore how narrative engagement varies with different hearing conditions and interventions.”
