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Redemptive narratives are contagious: Positivity in personal memories of hardship emerges after learning about others’ redemptive life events.

Poster Session C - Sunday, March 8, 2026, 5:00 – 7:00 pm PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballrooms

Dhaval Bhatt¹ (dhaval.b@columbia.edu), Meghan Meyer¹; ¹Columbia University

From reading fiction to seeking support, stories provide a structure to express our lived experiences – potentially, a reason we incorporate narratives in our everyday conversations. It is well known that arousal in narratives is linked to their memorability and tends to influence people’s behaviors. However, less is known about how the different emotional arcs within the narratives we consume influence our own personal memories. Here, we ask if an individual’s narration of their personal memories may take on the emotional arc of someone else's narrative, making some narrative arcs more contagious. Across two sessions, an online pool of participants (N=200) completed three phases of the study. First, they narrated a personal memory of hardship. Next, they read one of the three personal narratives from another person. Here, NLP was employed to ensure that all three versions present the same story with a different emotional arc (redemptive, tragic, or pessimistic). The third phase was completed 24 hours later; participants recalled their original personal memory again. Analyzing the language use and sentiment structure of these narratives, we find that participants selectively adopted only the redemptive arcs, making their stories more positive 24 hours later, while the other arcs did not show significant change. Our study finds that these emotional arcs may explain how some stories are integrated into our memories. Specifically, emotional arcs can influence whether it reshapes our own personal memories of hardship, with redemptive narratives being more contagious, perhaps because they leave us feeling better about our past.

Topic Area: EMOTION & SOCIAL: Emotion-cognition interactions