New study suggests binge-watching and marathon reading may have hidden psychological benefits

Two studies found that TV shows watched consecutively for longer durations or books read in long reading bouts were more memorable and more likely to be targets of retrospective imaginative involvement. In other words, when people engage in binge-watching a TV show or marathon reading a book, they are more likely to think about the stories of these shows and books afterward, relive them in their imagination, expand them, or imagine alternative story developments. The paper was published in Acta Psychologica.

People love stories. Stories are important because they organize experience into coherent, meaningful patterns, helping individuals understand events, motives of other people, and consequences of actions. They allow people to simulate social situations safely. This strengthens empathy, moral reasoning, and perspective taking.

When stories are fictional, such as those typically found in TV shows or books, they provide immersive emotional experiences without real-world risk, allowing people to feel fear, love, triumph, and loss safely. They offer narrative structure that makes sense of chaos, satisfying the deep cognitive preference humans have for meaning, coherence, and resolution. They also create parasocial bonds with characters, giving individuals companionship and social simulation that feels psychologically real.

Sometimes, people revisit completed stories in their minds, actively playing with their content, modifying them, continuing to elaborate them, or imagining alternatives for how the story could have progressed. This is referred to as retrospective imaginative involvement. Retrospective imaginative involvement goes beyond simple recall, as it involves actively expanding the fictional world in the mind.

People may reconstruct emotional moments and intensify them by adding imagined dialogue or unseen scenes. It appears when someone thinks about “what should have happened” or how events could have unfolded differently. This process can strengthen emotional attachment to characters because the story remains psychologically active after it has ended.

Study author Joshua Baldwin and his colleagues wanted to examine the characteristics of stories that are highly memorable and of those that are not so memorable. They were particularly interested in how this is related to engagement and retrospective imaginative involvement with those stories. More specifically, these authors wanted to explore the relationship between retrospective imaginative involvement and binge-watching of TV shows and marathon reading of books (or what they referred to as consecutive narrative consumption). They conducted two studies.

Participants of the first study were 303 undergraduate students recruited online from two universities in the U.S. Midwest. Participants’ average age was 20 years. In this study, participants were asked to name three memorable stories that they experienced as TV shows, books, or movies, as well as three unmemorable ones.

Study authors chose one of the highly memorable stories (the first listed) and one unmemorable (the second listed unmemorable story) and asked participants questions about them. Participants also completed assessments of their viewing motivation, tendency to binge watch (using the Binge-Watching Engagement and Symptoms Questionnaire), story enjoyment and appreciation, perceived stress (the Perceived Stress Questionnaire), leisure time use (the Nottingham Leisure Questionnaire), and retrospective imaginative involvement (the RII scale).

Participants of the second study were 237 undergraduate students. The study procedure was mostly identical to that of the first study, with study authors fixing some errors that they noticed in the Study 1 procedure.

Results showed that books and TV shows that were consumed consecutively for longer durations (i.e., TV shows that participants binge-watched and books with which participants engaged in marathon reading) tended to be more memorable and more likely to be targets of retrospective imaginative involvement.

Participants who have a tendency to binge-watch and who use stories as a way of escaping from their daily reality were more likely to experience retrospective imaginative involvement with stories. However, the researchers found that “boundary expansion”—watching stories to experience new things and grow beyond one’s everyday self—was an even stronger predictor of imagination than pure escapism.

Furthermore, how a viewer felt about a story changed how they imagined it later. Stories that were simply “enjoyed” (fun stories with happy endings) generally led to people mentally replaying the exact events. In contrast, stories that were deeply “appreciated” (meaningful, emotionally complex, or challenging narratives) triggered more dynamic imagination, inspiring people to invent backstories or imagine alternative plotlines to help process the story’s deeper meaning.

Also, having more leisure time increased retrospective imaginative involvement, while high stress decreased it (though the stress-reduction link was only statistically significant in the first study). In other words, people imagined alternate and extended story plot developments more when they had free time, and less often when they were under high mental stress, likely because stress depletes the cognitive resources needed for daydreaming.

“Overall, this study highlights how one’s memory of a story (and the factors that shape memorability) impacts imagination and fantasy. Results suggest that the formation of robust mental models about narratives could be facilitated through binge-watching which might help people recover from daily stressors through retrospective imagination,” study authors concluded.

The study contributes to the scientific understanding of the factors that make stories memorable. However, it should be noted that participants of both studies were solely undergraduate university students. Results on other demographic groups might differ.

The paper, “Watching one more episode and reading one more chapter: What entertainment contexts lead to retrospective imaginative involvement?,” was authored by Joshua Baldwin, Ezgi Ulusoy, Morgan Durfee, Rick Busselle, and David R. Ewoldsen.