Abstract. Recent empirical work on the semantics of emotion terms across many different cultures and languages, using a theoretical componential approach, suggested that four dimensions are needed to parsimoniously describe the semantic space of the emotion domain as reflected in emotion terms ( Fontaine, Scherer, Roesch, & Ellsworth, 2007 ; Fontaine, Scherer, & Soriano, 2013 ). In addition to valence, power, and arousal, a novelty dimension was discovered that mostly differentiated surprise from other emotions. Here, we further explore the existence and nature of the fourth dimension in semantic emotion space using a much larger and much more representative set of emotion terms. A group of 156 participants each rated 10 out of a set of 80 French emotion terms with respect to semantic meaning. The meaning of an emotion term was evaluated with respect to 68 emotion features representing the appraisal, action tendency, bodily reaction, expression, and feeling components of the emotion process. A principal component analysis confirmed the four-dimensional valence, power, arousal, and novelty structure. Moreover, this larger and much more representative set of emotion terms revealed that the novelty dimension not only differentiates surprise terms from other emotion terms, but also identifies substantial variation within the fear and joy emotion families.

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This paper investigated readers' representations of the main protagonist's emotional status in short narratives, as well as several mental factors that may affect these representations.General and visuo-spatial working memory, empathy and simulation were investigated as potential individual differences in generating emotional inferences. Participants were confronted with narratives conveying information about the protagonist's emotional state. We manipulated each narrative's target sentence according to its content (emotional label vs.description of the behavior associated to the emotion) and to its congruence to the story (matching vs. mismatching). The results showed that globally the difference between reading times of congruent and incongruent target sentences was bigger in the behavioral than in the emotional condition. This pattern was accentuated for high visuo-spatial working memory participants when they were asked to simulate the stories. These results support the idea that mental models may be of a perceptual nature and may more likely include behavioral elements than emotion labels per se, as suggested earlier by Gygax et al. (2007).Keywords: text comprehension, emotional inferences, self-paced reading paradigm, individual differences Running head: INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES AND EMOTIONAL INFERENCES 3 Individual differences and emotional inferences during reading comprehensionResearch on reading comprehension has shown that readers build mental models (Johnson-Laird, 1983) or situation models (Kintsch & van Dijk, 1978) of a scene depicted in a text that comprise both explicit and implicit elements. The latter are based on general knowledge and are referred to as inferences. Inferences generated during reading are often considered necessary to allow readers to maintain a certain local as well as global coherence of the text (Graesser, Singer, & Trabasso, 1994). Those establishing or maintaining local coherence connect adjacent constituents of the text, whereas those establishing or maintaining global coherence connect most constituents of the text by deeper features such as the theme of a narrative. The construction of a mental model is incremental, as readers continually update their representations with new information, either explicit or implicit (Garnham & Oakhill, 1996). If mental models can be relatively complex, they are nonetheless most likely tributary to readers' limited processing capacities (e.g., Baddeley, 1996), which may limit possible inferences as the text is being processed (i.e., on-line). Not surprisingly, research on inferences has repeatedly tried to identify which inferences are made on-line, and which are not, leading to a certain controversy on the actual need to make certain inferences.In this paper, we focus on the mental representation readers construct of the affective state of the main character in short narratives, which has typically been subject to controversy as to whether it was inferred on-line or not. If some theories suggest that this type of inference may not...

While dimensional models play a key role in emotion psychology, no consensus has been reached about their number and nature. The current study sheds a new light on this central issue by examining linear and non-linear relationships among the dimensions in the cognitive emotion structure. The meaning of 80 emotion terms was evaluated on 68 features representing appraisals, action tendencies, bodily reactions, expressions, and subjective experiences by 213 English-speaking US, 156 French-speaking Swiss, and 194 Indonesian-speaking Indonesian students. In a two-dimensional valence and arousal representation, neither linear nor non-linear relationships were observed. In a four-dimensional valence, power, arousal, and novelty representation, both linear (e.g. a positive relationship between valence and power) and non-linear (e.g. a strong positive correlation between valence and power found only for positively valenced emotion terms) relationships were observed. Joy-and sadness-related emotion terms where about as well represented by the two-than by the four-dimensional representation. However, especially anger-and surprise-related terms were only adequately represented by the four-dimensional representation. These findings were generalisable across the three languages. Even though a two-dimensional structure fits the data well in general, four dimensions are needed to sufficiently represent the cognitive structure of the whole gamut of human emotions.

Considering how fundamental and ubiquitous temporal information is in discourse (e.g., Zwaan & Radvansky, 1998), it seems rather surprising that the impact of the grammaticalization of the future on the way we perceive the future has only been scarcely studied. We argue that this may be due to its rather abstract nature and how it has been previously operationalized. In this review, we lay the foundation for studying the impact of the grammaticalization of the future on mental representations of the future by taking an interdisciplinary perspective, connecting cognitive sciences, linguistics, psycholinguistics, economics, and health psychology. More specifically, we argue that experimental psycholinguistics, combined with more applied domains, constitute a promising research avenue.

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