Engagement and mobile listening

Abstract

This research explores the effect of mobile listening on factors that have been proposed to determine enjoyment of audiovisual fictions: identification with characters, perceived realism, presence and transportation. A quasi–experimental research with 2 × 2 factorial design where the independent variables were listening condition (moving and stationary) and two different horror audio narratives (s1 and s2) was conducted. Main results show that mobile listening reduces identification, attention, narrative realism, spatial situation perception and cognitive involvement. Results also show that mobile listening does not diminish enjoyment of these narratives, which turns out to be predicted by narrative realism, empathetic–absorbent–behavioural identification, attention, high cognitive involvement and specific terrain of interest. The study also validates the scales for measuring the factors of engagement, which were originally proposed in the context of audiovisual narratives, for audio fictions.