The soap-opera study manifested the effects of pragmatic emphasis on analogical mapping (Spellman & Holyoak, 1996). The task comprised two parts: a plot-extension task and a mapping task. In the plot-extension task, subjects extended a given target story using an analogous source story as a guide. The source story emphasized a particular type of relation (romantic or professional) and thus subjects were expected to write continuations focusing on the emphasized relations. In the mapping task, subjects mapped each character from the source relations to a character from the target relations. Spellman and Holyoak found that pragmatic emphasis significantly affected mapping choice for both tasks.
The soap-opera model simulates performance in both the plot-extension and mapping tasks. Just as subjects did in the experiment, the model maps Peter and Mary in the source story to analogous characters in the target story. The results show the proportion choices for each possible mapping.