Presenter: Brinna Mawhinney – Psychology
Faculty Mentor(s): Sara D. Hodges, Eliott Doyle
Session: (In-Person) Poster Presentation
This study addresses one role that fiction may play in people’s lives—specifically, providing social “interaction.” Participants (265 University of Oregon students) completed a writing task that involved writing about fictional characters and completed measures of loneliness and social fuel to see if that interaction may fulfill social needs and alleviate loneliness. We hypothesized that higher transportation scores—a participant’s overall immersion in the story as judged by an outside reader’s perspective—would predict lower participant loneliness scores who are writing either from the perspective of a fictional character, to a fictional character, or their own journal entry. Furthermore, we hypothesized that the media source of each fictional character will moderate this relationship, with written source media producing higher transportation scores and lower loneliness scores than visual source media. Finally, we hypothesized that participants who wrote more fiction or journaled outside of the context of the study would earn higher transportation scores and also report lower loneliness scores. Results indicated that coder-rated transportation does significantly predict a larger reduction in loneliness scores. Neither media type nor participants’ own writing outside of the study moderated the relationship between transportation and change in loneliness. Results may have implications for developing a writing intervention to alleviate loneliness.