UCL study backed by Audible finds unconscious responses to the same book scenes, witnessed in adaptations across different media, are strongest in the auditory format

As Arya Stark watches from the crowd, tears streaming, King Joffrey toys with her father Ned Stark before executing him in front of a baying crowd. This scene from Game of Thrones is harrowing in any medium – but a new University College London study has found that audiobooks are more “emotionally engaging” than film and television adaptations.

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UCL, in collaboration with audiobook giant Audible, measured the physical reactions of 102 participants aged between 18 and 67 to audio and video depictions of scenes from books including A Game of Thrones, The Girl on the Train and Great Expectations. The scenes were chosen based on their “emotional intensity”, and for having minimal differences between the audio and video adaptations. For Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs, participants were shown or played Clarice’s interview with Dr Hannibal Lecter; in Pride and Prejudice, they witnessed Mr Darcy’s successful proposal to Elizabeth Bennet; and in The Hound of the Baskervilles, they heard and saw the first description of the beast.

As the participants watched or listened, the academics measured their heart rate and electrodermal activity. Once they were done, they were quizzed about their conscious responses to the clips.

According to the study, while the participants reported that the videos were “more engaging” than the audiobooks by about 15% on average, their physiological responses told a different story, with heart rates higher by about two beats a minute, and body temperatures raised by roughly two degrees when listening to audiobooks.

The resulting paper, Measuring Narrative Engagement: The Heart Tells the Story, says: “Although participants self-reported greater involvement for watching video relative to listening … they had stronger physiological responses for auditory stories including higher heart rates, greater electrodermal activity, and even higher body temperatures. We interpret these findings as physiological evidence that the stories were more cognitively and emotionally engaging when presented in an auditory format. This may be because listening to a story is a more active process of co-creation (via imagination) than watching a video.”

The evidence was consistent across different stories and different participant ages, according to the study, which has been published ahead of submission to a peer-reviewed journal in the coming months.

Dr Joseph Devlin, head of experimental psychology at UCL and lead researcher on the project, said: “One of our predictions was that listening to a book would be more cognitive work because you as a listener are involved in the co-creation of the story, using your imagination. You’re hearing the story but mentally you’re doing all the work, whereas when you’re watching it, it’s more of a passive experience. The director’s imagination has brought it to life. We’d anticipated we might see something in the physiology but we didn’t expect the results to be as clear as they were.”

A spokesperson for Audible, which approached UCL to do the research, said the company would have been happy for the university to publish its findings in academic circles even if the results had been less positive about audiobooks.

“The data are what the data are and we wanted the opportunity to publish them regardless, and Audible were totally fine about that,” said Devlin.

Spending on audiobooks has more than doubled since 2013, leaping from £12m to £31m in 2017, according to figures from the Publishers Association.