The effect of a protagonist’s emotional shift on situation model construction

Komeda, Hidetsugu; Kusumi, Takashi

doi:10.3758/bf03195918

Cited by 52 publications

(43 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…These results are not consistent with those of prior studies of words or sentences (e.g., Fischer & Zwaan, 2008), but do point to a phenomenon that is particular to the reading of relatively long stories. This phenomenon is congruent with previous psychological and literary research (Larsen & Seilman, 1988;Miall & Kuiken, 1999;Komeda & Kusumi, 2006).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 79%

“…Second, if perceptual memory interacted with the emotional processes that arise during reading, especially during the reading of relatively long texts, the perceptual memory retrieval task would be associated with increased RTs, given the extra processing found in prior studies. Komeda and Kusumi (2006) showed that readers generally monitor emotional shifts, causing increased RTs for sentences involving emotional shifts. In particular, Cupchik and László (1994) showed that RTs were longer for texts containing more meaningful comments about life and more evocative images.…”

Section: Hypotheses and Overview Of The Experimentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Effect of Perceptual and Personal Memory Retrieval on Story Comprehension

Tsunemi

Kusumi

2011

PSYCHOLOGIA -An International Journal of Psychological Sciences

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This study focused on the relationship between personal perceptual memory and story comprehension. In two experiments, participants read story texts. Half the participants were asked to retrieve highly vivid perceptual memories (Exp. 1) or autobiographical memories as highly perceptual and personal memories (Exp. 2) before reading a story, and the other half were asked to retrieve less vivid perceptual memories, as a control task, before reading. Results showed that participants read more slowly under the highly perceptual memory retrieval condition only when their experiences were relatively similar to the experiences depicted in the story. Additionally, similarity between story content and participants' experiences was positively correlated with enjoyment of the story in both experiments. We interpreted the results as indicating that individuals are involved in emotional processes when they are able to integrate their own perceptual memories into the story content. Personal perceptual memory also appeared to contribute to story comprehension.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 79%

Section: Hypotheses and Overview Of The Experimentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Effect of Perceptual and Personal Memory Retrieval on Story Comprehension

Tsunemi

Kusumi

2011

PSYCHOLOGIA -An International Journal of Psychological Sciences

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“…We suggested that due to the attention-grabbing quality of negative information, negative endings are devoted more careful processing or are more difficult to integrate. It is possible, however, that increased latencies for negative endings may reflect readers' updating of characters' emotional status (as in Komeda & Kusumi, 2006). Readers may tend to attribute a mildly positive emotional state to the story characters as a default and therefore need to update their model of characters' emotional status when the character experiences a negative event.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

How valence affects language processing: Negativity bias and mood congruence in narrative comprehension

Egidi

Gerrig

2009

Memory & Cognition

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The present research examined how positive and negative moods affect readers' understanding of positive and negative story endings. It demonstrated how negativity bias and mood congruence emerge during narrative comprehension. Participants were induced to experience either a positive or a negative mood and then read stories that could have either a positive or a negative ending. In Experiment 1, participants took longer to integrate negative endings than positive endings, independent of their mood. In Experiment 2, participants judged as more surprising those endings that did not match their mood. The present results illustrate that ending valence has strong influence on moment-by-moment reading, but that readers' moods influence expectations for story outcomes once readers reflect on a complete representation of the story.

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“…If, according to Goldie (1999), readers can maintain a certain observer's position when involved in empathic processes, they still anticipate how the main protagonist is going to behave and how he or she is going to feel. Some researchers on emotional inferences have strongly suggested that empathy was an important factor in the representation of emotions during reading (e.g., Komeda & Kusumi, 2006). More empathic readers may therefore build complex representations of emotions.…”

Section: Running Head: Individual Differences and Emotional Inferencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Individual differences and emotional inferences during reading comprehension.

Gillioz¹,

Gygax²,

Tapiero³

2012

Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology / Revue canadienne

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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...

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The effect of a protagonist’s emotional shift on situation model construction

Cited by 52 publications

References 22 publications

The Effect of Perceptual and Personal Memory Retrieval on Story Comprehension

The Effect of Perceptual and Personal Memory Retrieval on Story Comprehension

How valence affects language processing: Negativity bias and mood congruence in narrative comprehension

Individual differences and emotional inferences during reading comprehension.

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