Work

Specificity of Emotion Inferences as a Function of Emotional Contextual Support

Year: 2015

Type: article

Abstract: Research on emotion inferences has shown that readers include a representation of the main character's emotional state in their mental representations of the text. We examined the specificity of emotion representations as a function of the emotion content of short narratives, in terms of the quantity and quality of emotion components included in the narratives, based on the GRID instrument (Fontaine, Scherer, Roesch, & Ellsworth, 2007; Fontaine, Scherer, & Soriano, 2013; Scherer, 2005). In a self-paced reading task, target sentences that only moderately matched the emotional context were read faster than target sentences that strongly matched the emotional context of the narratives. In a “makes sense” judgment task, we showed that this result was not driven by a mapping difficulty, and in a memory task, we provided some evidence that these effects reflected integration processes. We suggest that readers can integrate specific emotions into their mental representations, but only if provided with the appropriate emotional contextual support.

Source: Discourse Processes

DOI: 10.1080/0163853x.2015.1095597

Authors: Christelle Gillioz, Pascal M. Gygax

Institution: University of Fribourg

Language: English

Topic: Reading and Literacy Development

Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology

Field: Psychology

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: green

Funders: National Science Foundation, Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung

Awards: Applications of nonliner spectroscopy to the study of ultrafast photoinduced processes, Emotion inferences and text comprehension: Narrative characteristics and their influence on emotion inferences elaboration