From Story to Heartbeats

Stories have the potential to emotionally and cognitively absorb us, and the degree to which audiences become immersed in narrative content (e.g., films, plays) is reflected in synchronization of their physiological response, including heart rate. This heart-rate synchrony (HRS) has been repeatedly demonstrated in laboratory-based studies using prerecorded content such as television or film. For live events, HRS has so far only been demonstrated for live music performances which typically do not have an explicit narrative. With live music performances, HRS is thought to be driven by the rhythm of the music and audience movement. Here we sought to demonstrate HRS for the first time in audience members during a live theater performance. We were also interested in how HRS might relate to memory-based, end-of-performance measures of audience engagement and enjoyment, including clapping behavior and questionnaire responses. To this end, we collected heart rate, movement, and questionnaire data from 121 theatergoers across a run of 10 performances of a major theatrical production. We found significant HRS both within- and between-performances with the HRS being reliably higher within performance compared to between-performances. The end-of-performance measures were all related to each other, including applause vigor; self-reported immersion, enjoyment, and narrative engagement but none of these measures related strongly to HRS, suggesting an interesting disassociation between moment-by-moment measures of audience responses and retrospective memory-based ones.