José Sanders

Identification as a Mechanism of Narrative Persuasion

To provide a causal test of identification as a mechanism of narrative persuasion, this study uses the perspective from which a story is told to manipulate identification experimentally and test effects on attitudes. In experiment 1, 120 participants read a story that was told either from the perspective of one character or another character, with both characters having opposing goals. Results showed that perspective influenced identification and story consistency of attitudes. Moreover, identification with one of the characters mediated the effect of perspective on attitudes. In experiment 2, 200 participants read a different story that was told from one of two perspectives, with both characters having opposing opinions. Results showed that identification with both characters mediated the effect of perspective on attitudes. The results of these experiments indicate that identification can be a mechanism of narrative persuasion.

Expecting reciprocity: Towards a model of the participants’ perspective on participatory journalism

This study examines ‘participatory journalism’ from the perspective of participants. Through a series of in-depth interviews with 32 participants from two different participatory journalistic environments set up by professional news organizations, we investigated how participants view and evaluate their participation in journalism. We propose that participants views progress through a series of four stages: anticipation, participation, evaluation and reconsideration. A clear breach is observed between the stage of anticipation and evaluation. We propose that this breach could be couched in terms of both a need and a wish for reciprocity, but also a lack of it. The term ‘reciprocity’ is inspired by Lewis et al.’s notion of ‘reciprocal journalism’ and Loosen and Schmidt’s conceptualization of journalism as a ‘social system’. Implications for the study of participatory journalism and journalism practitioners are discussed.

Linguistic perspective in short news stories

character’s discourse or consciousness. Subtle perspective that introduces an implicit viewpoint, is accomplished by a variety of linguistic features such as tense shifts and marked choices of referring expressions. The effect of the two kinds of perspective on readers’ appreciation of news texts and stories was tested in two experiments. In Experiment 1, news text and story versions with subtle and strong perspective were presented along with neutralized versions. Focalization made news text versions unacceptable, but was unproblematic in story versions, Text versions with focalization were judged as more subjective, more suspenseful, and livelier than versions without perspective. The failure of subtle perspective alone to show reliable effects in this experiment may have been due to the presence of the unacceptable focalized versions. Those versions were excluded from Experiment 2, where versions with subtle perspective were compared to neutralized versions. This restricted comparison yielded a positive effect of subtle perspective on acceptability and affective judgments.

Evoking and Measuring Identification with Narrative Characters – A Linguistic Cues Framework

Current research on identification with narrative characters poses two problems. First, although identification is seen as a dynamic process of which the intensity varies during reading, it is usually measured by means of post-reading questionnaires containing self-report items. Second, it is not clear which linguistic characteristics evoke identification. The present paper proposes that an interdisciplinary framework allows for more precise manipulations and measurements of identification, which will ultimately advance our understanding of the antecedents and nature of this process. The central hypothesis of our Linguistic Cues Framework is that identification with a narrative character is a multidimensional experience for which different dimensions are evoked by different linguistic cues. The first part of the paper presents a literature review on identification, resulting in a renewed conceptualization of identification which distinguishes six dimensions: a spatiotemporal, a perceptual, a cognitive, a moral, an emotional, and an embodied dimension. The second part argues that each of these dimensions is influenced by specific linguistic cues which represent various aspects of the narrative character’s perspective. The proposed relations between linguistic cues and identification dimensions are specified in six propositions. The third part discusses what psychological and neurocognitive methods enable the measurement of the various identification dimensions in order to test the propositions. By establishing explicit connections between the linguistic characteristics of narratives and readers’ physical, psychological, and neurocognitive responses to narratives, this paper develops a research agenda for future empirical research on identification with narrative characters.

From Reader to Mediated Witness The Engaging Effects of Journalistic Crime Narratives

This study tests the claim that news narratives about shocking criminal acts enable readers to become mediated witnesses, which implies that readers identify with actual eyewitnesses to a crime and vicariously experience the crime from up close. In an experiment (n = 128), participants read an original narrative newspaper article about a mass shooting or an original non-narrative article about the same event. Results provided evidence for a mediated witness experience: Readers of the narrative identified more strongly with eyewitnesses of the crime and had a stronger sense of being present at the shooting than readers of the non-narrative article.

Text and text analysis

This article focuses on ‘text,’ which is defined here as a monological stretch of written discourse that shows coherence. The basic characteristics of ‘texthood’ – that is, the referential and relational coherence of its constituent parts – are discussed. Then, ‘text analysis’ is defined as the systematic dissection of a textual unity in its constituent parts and the study of those parts in relation to each other. The instrument of text analysis can be used with various research goals – whether understanding the linguistic, cognitive, computational, or evaluative nature of a text. We provide an overview of several leading linguistic methods of text analysis. Text analyses of natural language texts have a crucial role to play in text linguistics and discourse studies, because the development of theoretical models of discourse phenomena needs to proceed in interaction with the study of the (sometimes very complex) reality of natural language in use. Finally, we discuss issues for further research, pointing toward innovative text analytic research: that of corpora of natural texts, but also of multimodal documents.

Seven Ways to Knit Your Portfolio: Is Investor Communication Neutral?

The concept of “familiarity” has been used in financial economics to explain apparent paradoxes in people’s behavior, such as the home bias in portfolio choices. In this study, we investigate whether (lack of) familiarity with the language of investor communication may contribute to an explanation of the well-documented gender gap in financial decision-making (i.e. women participate less in the stock market than men and, if they do, they take less risk than men). Using an interdisciplinary framework that combines insights from Behavioral Economics, Finance, Social Psychology and Linguistics, we analyze the metaphors used in websites that target beginning retail investors in three different languages; Dutch, Italian and English UK. We find that in all three languages the metaphors used come from the same conceptual domains; namely, war, health, physical activity, game, farming and the five senses. As these domains refer to worlds that are predominantly and (stereo)typically masculine, we conclude that the language of investor communication may give rise to feelings of familiarity and belonging among men, while creating feelings of distance and non-belonging among women. In other words, just as emotional responses influence risk assessment and return expectations, the language used in financial communication may contribute to explaining the gender gap in stock market participation, risk taking and portfolio choice.

Quoted discourse in Dutch news narratives

This chapter adapts an existing model of discourse presentation to examine what journalistic narrators actually do when they represent words uttered previously by news sources, and how linguistic choices express the function such presentations may fulfil. It briefly addresses how quoted discourse is discussed and categorized in literature and systematically investigates what types of quotation occur in a corpus of older and recent Dutch news texts. As material, a corpus of Dutch newspaper texts was assembled in two sub-corpora. The first sub-corpus consists of old newspaper texts from 1950, and the second of recent newspaper texts from 2002. Both sub-corpora were taken from five national Dutch newspapers and eight sections. The texts from 1950 were copied from microfilm, the 2002 texts were extracted from the international newspaper database Lexis Nexis. All news texts in the corpus were closely read, marking out each instance of discourse presentation. Keywords: Dutch News Text; journalistic narrators; Lexis Nexis; linguistic choices

Historical Trends in the Pragmatics of Indirect Reports in Dutch Crime News Stories

Recent research has shown that the use of indirect reports in Dutch crime news stories has decreased significantly over the past 150 years. In this study we explore possible explanations for this decrease by assessing variations in the degree of intertwinement between the voices of journalist and news source in a corpus of 528 indirect reports. Results indicate that in indirect reports from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the journalist’s voice was typically either dominant over or strongly intertwined with the news source’s voice. In later periods, the voices of journalist and news source seem to have become disentangled. The decrease in indirect reports in Dutch news stories might thus be explained by an increased avoidance of the subjective intertwining of voices and, correspondingly, an increased separation of responsibilities between journalist and news sources. In this sense, the pragmatics of indirect reports became similar to the pragmatics of direct reports, causing the grammatically embedding indirect mode to lose its distinctive function.

Motives for health information behavior: Patterns more refined than traditional dichotomies. A study among women in a cervix treatment process

ABSTRACT Health consumers are increasingly expected to play an active role with respect to their health and make informed decisions. Therefore, it is essential that health information meets the needs and expectations of health consumers. Online health information is examined from the perspectives of patients with uterine cervical dysplasia undergoing a frequently performed gynecological procedure at an outpatient clinic of a general, top clinical Dutch hospital. The information behavior of 40 women was studied qualitatively by means of interviews and observations in three phases from the start of their medical episode: the emergence or lack of information needs (interviews); the choice for particular information sources or channels (interviews); and searching for information on the Internet (both observations and interviews). The results of the study identified five patterns of information behavior: inactive/passive (N = 5), sensitive/limited (N = 7), selective/problem solving (N = 5), constructive/explorative (N = 8), and assertive/browsing (N = 4). Examples of corresponding recommendations are discussed which aim at optimizing health information.