This repository is divided into four folders: **Analysis**, **Data**, **Documents** and **Materials**. In **Analysis**, sample R code for the theme similarity analyses is available. In **Data**, the following content is available: - (i) participant scores on transportation, story comprehension, and self-reported lingering - (ii) participants’ free association chains - (iii) participant-generated descriptions of the lingering experience - (iv) participant-generated theme words In **Documents**, a copy of the manuscript and Supplementary Information is available In **Materials**, the following content is available: - (i) multiple-choice comprehension tests for Carver and July stories - (ii) modified versions of the Narrative transportation scale (Green & Brock, 2000) - (iii) verbatim instructions for theme generation - (iv) the full word list used in Experiment 2 - (v) intact versions of each story, as used in the experiments - (vi) interactive, HTML-based, demos of the free association and self-paced reading tasks for each dataset reported in the manuscript. **NOTE**: *HTML files can be opened in most web-browsers or read using a plaintext editor. The scrambled versions of each story are available as separate HTML files.*