Bi-Annual Conference of the International
Society for Research on Emotion
July 8-10, 2015
Mental representations of emotion during reading are
based on emotion components
Christelle Gillioz1, Pascal Gygax 2
University of California1, University of Fribourg2
The specificity of the emotion included in the readers’ mental representation
of the text has been questioned by Gygax et al. (2003, 2004), who showed that
readers do not differentiate between similar emotions during reading. One
possible explanation for this non-specificity may be that readers did not have
sufficient information to infer a specific emotion, not in terms of quantity but in
terms of quality. In this study, we investigated whether the quality of the content
of the narratives, in terms of emotion components, could prompt readers to
infer specific emotions. Twenty-four emotional narratives were constructed
based on the features contained in the GRID instrument (Fontaine et al., 2013;
Scherer, 2005), that assesses which feature of each emotion component is the
most likely to be inferred when an emotion term is used in one’s language. We
manipulated the degree of congruency of the emotional narratives by varying
the number of emotion components in the narratives. In the optimal version,
the narratives included all components qualified by their most typical feature.
In the moderate version, two components were omitted. All narratives ended
with a target sentence containing the intended emotion. Thirty-six participants
had to read the narratives and to decide as fast as possible whether the target
sentence was a sensible continuation of the preceding narrative. The proportions of target sentences evaluated as sensible continuations of the preceding
context were very high in both conditions (moderate: 93.4%, optimal: 96.3%),
which shows that all target sentences matched readers’ mental representations. Crucially, participants were 77 milliseconds faster to say that the target
sentences were sensible continuations of the preceding context in the optimal than in the moderate condition. These results support our hypothesis that
enhancing the emotion context, in terms of emotion components provided in
narratives helps readers to infer specific emotions.
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