Ithaca College

Associate Professor Leigh Ann Vaughn (Psychology) was a colloquium speaker at Syracuse University’s Psychology Department on Friday, October 19, 2012.

Professor Vaughn’s presentation was titled, “Regulatory Fit, Processing Fluency, and Narrative Impact”.

The presentation discussed research by Professor Vaughn and her Social Judgment Research Team on how narratives mentally transport and persuade. For millennia, people have used narratives to inform and persuade.  However, little social psychological research has addressed how and when narrative persuasion occurs, perhaps because narratives are complex stimuli that are difficult to vary without significantly changing the plot or characters. Professor Vaughn and her research team have developed methods that experimentally vary psychological engagement with what participants are currently doing – methods that affect narrative transportation and persuasion without affecting the stories themselves.