Emotion inferencesduring reading comprehension: What evidence can the self-pace reading paradigm provide?

This paper provides an explanation for the non-specificity of emotion inferences found in previous research (e.g., Gygax, Garnham & Oakhill, 2004). We first demonstrate that behavioral components of emotions, as opposed to emotions per se, are better markers of readers’ mental representations of the main character’s affective status. We also suggest that in a self-paced reading paradigm, when participants read sentences slower than others, it does not unequivocally provide insight into their mental representations of the text. We show that specific control conditions need to be implemented before such an assumption can be made in order to separate inference and representation processes from contextual integration processes