Individual differences and emotional inferences during reading comprehension.

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)

The specificity of emotion inferences in text comprehension: the role of top-down and bottom-up processes

The aim of this thesis was to investigate the influence of individual differences and the nature of the information presented to readers on emotion inferences in text comprehension, in particular on the specificity of these emotion inferences. Research on emotion inferences has led some researchers to suggest that emotion inferences made during reading are specific (e.g., Gernsbacher et al., 1992) whereas others (e.g., Gygax et al., 2007) proposed that readers do not need to elaborate a complex representation of emotions but preferentially infer some components of emotion (like behavioral information), stereotypical of emotion responses. The present thesis investigated the conditions under which readers may go further than the component level and reach complex emotion representations. Results presented in Chapter 3 demonstrate that top-down processes related to readers’ individual differences (i.e., empathy and working memory) or to reading strategies (i.e., simulation, elaboration time) do not fully explain the under-specificity of emotion inferences found in previous research (e.g., Gygax et al., 2003, 2004; Molinari et al., 2009). However, bottom-up processes, examined in the second part of the thesis, in terms of the relevancy of emotion information (i.e., emotion components) conveyed in the narratives, better account for the specificity of emotion inferences. To investigate this issue, an optimal congruent vs. moderate congruent paradigm (as opposed to the habitual match vs. mismatch paradigm) was developed. In this new paradigm, the emotional content of the narratives was manipulated based on the number of emotion components and on their typicality regarding the intended emotion. Chapter 5 presents three experiments suggesting that when the narratives convey highly typical emotion information, readers are very likely to integrate specific emotion inferences into their mental models of the text. When the narratives convey less typical emotion information (but still matching the intended emotion), readers may only map the incoming emotion information onto their representations of the texts. Although highly critical as regard to the materials used in previous studies on the matter (e.g., Gygax and colleagues, 2003, 2004 and 2007), this thesis brings further support for Gygax et al.’s (2007) claim that emotion inferences are elaborated in a constructive manner. Chapter 5’s experiments actually showed that emotion inferences are based on emotion components (as defined in the emotion literature), which are activated and integrated incrementally in readers’ mental representations. Importantly this thesis shows that a shift of paradigm and an interdisciplinary approach were needed to further our understanding of the processes underlying emotion inferences when comprehending text

Introduction to experimental linguistics

The use of experimental methodology in the field of linguistics has boomed in recent decades. However, implementation of such methods does require an understanding and mastery of specific theoretical and methodological principles. Introduction to Experimental Linguistics presents the key concepts of experimental linguistics in an accessible way, addressing, in turn: the application of experimentation in linguistics; the techniques most frequently used for the study of language; the methodological and practical aspects useful for the implementation of an experiment; and an introduction to the analysis of quantitative data derived from experiments. This didactic book combines the elements presented with examples drawn from the various fields of linguistics. It also includes a number of resources available for people who wish to implement an experimental study, more advanced reading suggestions, and revision questions along with their answer key

Emotion inferences during reading: Going beyond the tip of the iceberg

In this chapter, we present theoretical and empirical advances in our understanding of the way readers build mental representations of the main protagonists’ emotional status. Based on the highly influential and grounding studies of Morton Ann Gernsbacher and her colleagues in the nineties, we present several studies that have tried to specify the nature of readers’ mental representations of emotions as well as the conditions that may facilitate emotion inferences. Though often (unfortunately) underestimated, of special interest in this chapter is the interdisciplinary nature of emotion inferences as well as the empirical and theoretical opportunities that true interdisciplinary approaches of emotion inferences may provide us with in the future

The specificity of emotion inferences as a function of emotional contextual support

Research on emotion inferences has shown that readers include a representation of the main character's emotional state in their mental representations of the text. We examined the specificity of emotion representations as a function of the emotion content of short narratives, in terms of the quantity and quality of emotion components included in the narratives, based on the GRID instrument (Fontaine et al., 2013). In a self-paced reading task, target sentences that only moderately matched the emotional context were read faster than target sentences that strongly matched the emotional context of the narratives. In a “makes sense” judgment task, we showed that this result was not driven by a mapping difficulty and, in a memory task, we provided some evidence that these effects reflected integration processes. We suggest that readers can integrate specific emotions into their mental representations, but only if provided with the appropriate emotional contextual support

Individual differences and emotional inferences during reading comprehension

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)

Emotional Intelligence and Emotional Hypersensitivity in Gifted Individuals

The goal of the present study was to investigate the associations between high intelligence, emotional intelligence (EI), and emotional hypersensitivity in a sample of 304 Mensa members. In addition, we aimed to shed light on how highly intelligent individuals process emotional information. In a previous study, we found that individuals with high EI in the general population are characterized by an attentional bias toward emotional information. We tested whether this effect holds for highly intelligent individuals by drawing on the same procedure: participants (N = 124 Mensa members) had to report a letter appearing behind a picture of a face with emotional or a neutral facial expression, and their reaction time to provide an answer was recorded. Comparing the results from the general population to those of Mensa members, we found that Mensa members did not show the attentional bias toward emotional information found in the general population. Mensa members were equally fast to evaluate letters replacing emotional and neutral expressions, and this result was not influenced by EI level. Possible explanations include the role of inhibitory processes (a factor related to intelligence), which might have contributed to treating emotional information as purely cognitive