The Role of the Establishment of Causal Connections and the Modality of Presentation of Discourse in the Generation of Emotion Inferences by Argentine College Students

Gender-based violence in Latin America (Ecuador and Argentina): current state and challenges in the development of psychoeducational materials

“…In consequence, promoting that students get emotionally involved appears to facilitate that they elaborate on statements that are key to comprehend and learn from the material. This finding converges with recent studies, which suggest that establishing a high number of discourse connections [ 67 , 70 , 81 , 96 ], getting emotionally involved with the material [ 72 , 80 ], and performing elaborative question answering tasks facilitate discourse comprehension [ 85 , 97 ]. It also expands these studies, given that it focuses on the interplay between these variables, and on the comprehension of written and spoken spontaneous discourse on the prevention of GBV.…”

“…It would be, thus, interesting that future studies compared the role of these variables in the comprehension of students from other countries, such as Argentina. This would allow us to explore whether we would observe the same results (this is possible, given that prior research has already suggested that the establishment of causal connections and the generation of emotion inferences play a role in written and spoken discourse comprehension by college students from this country [ 67 , 70 , 89 ]. It is also possible that results would differ, given that there are cultural and educational differences between these two countries [ 98 ].…”

“…This allowed us to identify which statements had a high number of them, which have been proposed to represent the main ideas of the material [ 93 , 94 ]. In order to establish which of these main ideas also promoted the generation of emotion inferences , we identified statements that represented outcomes of attempts to obtain goals, following prior studies [ 70 , 77 , 79 ]. These analyses allowed us to identify 5 main emotional statements in the interview (that is, 5 statements that had high causal connectivity and promoted the generation of an emotion inference).…”

“…Prior studies suggest that events with many causal connections are recalled more often [56,[62][63][64][65], rated as more important [59], more often included in summarization protocols [66], more often identified as introducing a topic shift [67], and retrieved more quickly [68] than events with few connections in the comprehension of written and spoken discourse. In turn, the generation of emotion inferences have been proposed to enrich the mental representation that comprehenders construct of the text [69][70][71][72][73][74]. These elaborative inferences involve establishing a causal connection between an event and the psychological reaction that it is expected to trigger, using our prior knowledge on emotions [71,72,[75][76][77].…”

“…In this example, we can infer that the woman experiences HAPPINESS. We expect comprehenders' to generate this inference, given that the protagonist succeeded in her attempt to obtain a goal [70,79]. The processing of discourse and the generation of emotion inferences have also been found to facilitate that comprehenders experience emotions [72,80,81].…”