Overcome with emotions: understanding the effects of emotional information in text on reading comprehension and processing

This thesis explores the effects of emotional information about characters in text on processing. In five chapters presenting nine experiments in total, readers were presented with emotional characters that occurred either in small texts or in sentences. In the second chapter, it was investigated whether mental representations of entities in sentences are more salient and easier to retrieve due to emotional information. In the third chapter, the effects of emotional information about multiple different characters on processing were explored. The forth chapter presents experiments on perspective taking and how perspective affects the way emotional information is processed. Building up on that, in chapter 5, it was investigated how the mood of the reader influences perspective taking when reading about emotional information. All experiments in the first four chapters used a self-paced reading method to explore effects on reading speed (reading times). Chapter 6, however, presents an eye-tracking experiment set out to explore the effects of perspective on reading behaviour in more detail and to determine where perspective differences arise in the text. Hence, pronoun regions (including perspective cues) across the text were analysed. The findings presented in this thesis gave evidence that readers focus more on emotional characters (that emotional characters are more salient), and that readers also engage more with (emotional) texts when they experience the situation from a personal perspective. All experiments gave evidence that readers track and use emotional information to form a coherent representation of the text

Remember they were emotional - effects of emotional qualifiers during sentence processing

We investigated whether emotional information facilitates retrieval and whether it makes representations more salient during sentence processing. Participants were presented with sentences including entities (nouns) that were either bare, with no additional information or that were emotionally or neutrally qualified by means of adjectives. Reading times in different word regions, specifically at the region following the verb where retrieval processes are measurable, were analysed. Qualified representations needed longer time to be build up than bare representations. Also, it was found that the amount of information and the type of information affect sentences processing and more specifically retrieval. In particular, retrieval for emotionally specified representations was faster than that for bare representations

Tracking your emotions – an eye-tracking study on reader's engagement with perspective during text comprehension

An eye-tracking study explored perspective effects on eye-movements during reading. We presented texts that included either a personal perspective (you) or an onlooker perspective (he/she). We measured whether fixations on the pronouns themselves differed as a function of perspective, and whether fixations on pronouns were affected by the emotional valence of the text which was either positive or negative. It was found that early in the text, processing of you is easier than he or she. However, as the character referred to by he/she becomes more familiar, fixations on he/she decrease, specifically in negative contexts

Anticipating causes and consequences

Two visual world eye-tracking experiments investigated anticipatory looks to implicit causes and implicit consequences in two clause sentences with mental state verbs (Stimulus-Experiencer and Experiencer-Stimulus) in the first main clause, and an explicit cause or consequence in the second. The first experiment showed that, just as when all continuations are causes, people look early at the implicit cause, when all continuations are consequences they look early at the implicit consequence, for the same verbs. When causes and consequences are intermixed, people direct their looks at the cause or consequence on a trial-by-trial basis depending on the connective (“because” or “and so”). Numerically, causes were favored overall, even when all the endings were consequences, but the effect was only significant at the end of the sentences in Experiment 2. The results are discussed in terms of rapid deployment of causal and consequential information implicit in mental state verbs, and in relation to conflicting accounts of why causes or consequences might generally be favored