ArticlePsychophysiology2025
Seeing Is Feeling: How Aphantasia Alters Emotional Engagement With Stories.
Article in Psychophysiology, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
1 citing paper in PubMed.
- Seeing Is Feeling: How Aphantasia Alters Emotional Engagement With Stories.Psychophysiology · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Visual imagery is thought to act as an "emotional amplifier," potentially contributing to narrative engagement. To examine this, we conducted two experiments in which participants were presented with emotionally charged audio and video story excerpts. Experiment 1 included 84 online participants from the general population, while Experiment 2 involved 25 individuals with aphantasia (the inability to generate mental images) and 25 controls. In both experiments we assessed narrative engagement behaviorally using the Narrative Engagement Questionnaire (NEQ), while for Experiment 2 we also measured physiological responses. We found a main effect of modality, with video stimuli scoring higher across all NEQ subscales in both experiments. Notably, in experiment 2, a significant group effect on emotional-but not cognitive-engagement emerged, with aphantasics reporting less emotional engagement than controls. Moreover, controls experienced higher heart rate during audio narratives, while aphantasics had a similar heart rate across both modalities. Our results suggest that the enhanced physiological response seen in non-aphantasics during audio narratives is driven by the mental effort required to generate imagery. Furthermore, this capacity for visual imagery appears to enhance emotional engagement with stories. This highlights mental imagery's role in both subjective and physiological responses, emphasizing distinct cognitive processes during narrative engagement.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.