This study investigates the impact of narrative voice (first-person vs third-person) and reception mode (reading vs listening) on empathy, identification, and parasocial interaction in literary engagement. It is motivated by contradictory findings regarding how narrative voice influences readers’ emotional and cognitive responses to literary texts, as well as the question of whether audiobooks condition the impact of narrative voice. In an experiment, participants engaged with a novella with first- or third-person narration presented in either written or audiobook format. Although the results indicate that narrative voice does not affect social emotions, listening to an audiobook reduced self-oriented emotions, such as empathic stress and emotional involvement, relative to reading print. No significant effects were observed for all other subdimensions related to empathy, identification, and parasocial interaction. It thus appears that by introducing an audiobook performance as a layer of distance, participants were prevented from experiencing strong self-oriented emotions.
Schwabe et al. (Thu,) studied this question.