The Role of Participation in Aesthetic Illusion

We suggest that narrative participation represents a particular type of cognitive and emotional engagement that enhances aesthetic illusion. To support that claim, we introduce the participatory perspective on narrative experiences, which asserts that people function as side participants to narrative events. After extending that perspective to viewers of film narratives, we provide a taxonomy of participatory responses and give examples of these responses from research with viewers. We next consider factors that may affect participation: some factors are features of particular films (e. g., editing style and music) whereas others lie within individual viewers (e. g., personality variables and life experiences). A final section outlines empirical research that may provide evidence for the relationship between narrative participation and aesthetic illusion.