ABSTRACT

While research has repeatedly found evidence that readers infer characters’ emotions, we investigate three outstanding questions about the content and time course of such inferences. We ask whether even simple narratives give rise to emotion inferences, in what form such inferences are encoded into long-term memory, and whether they are uniquely bound to the character whose actions prompted the inference. To address these issues, we had participants read simple, sentence-long stories that allowed ready emotion inferences. Compared to performance on control stories, participants took longer to reject the implied emotion term in an immediate paradigm (Experiment 1) and were less accurate in a delayed paradigm when primed by the name of the character who experienced the emotion (Experiment 2). In Experiment 3, we primed participants in a delayed recognition paradigm with either the name of the character who experienced the emotion or a secondary character who did not. Participants were less accurate in rejecting the implied emotion term when primed by both character names. These results suggest that readers can encode emotion inferences based on simple narratives and that they encode those inferences into long-memory with minimal content. In addition, those emotion inferences may be activated from features of the general narrative situation, rather than only by the character whose actions or experiences prompted the inference.

摘要

虽然研究一再发现读者推断角色情绪的证据，但我们调查了关于此类推断的内容和时间过程的三个突出问题。我们会问，即使是简单的叙述是否也会引起情感推理，这些推理以何种形式被编码到长期记忆中，以及它们是否与行为引发推理的角色有唯一联系。为了解决这些问题，我们让参与者阅读简单的、句子长的故事，这些故事可以进行现成的情感推断。与在控制故事中的表现相比，参与者在直接范式（实验 1）中拒绝隐含的情感术语需要更长的时间，并且在延迟范式中，当以经历情感的角色的名字作为引导时，其准确性较低（实验 2）。在实验 3 中，我们用经历过这种情绪的角色的名字或没有经历过这种情绪的次要角色的名字来引导参与者进入延迟识别范式。当被两个角色名称启动时，参与者在拒绝隐含的情感术语方面不太准确。这些结果表明，读者可以根据简单的叙述对情感推断进行编码，并将这些推断编码到内容最少的长记忆中。此外，这些情绪推断可能是由一般叙事情境的特征激活的，而不仅仅是由其行为或经历引发推断的角色激活。这些结果表明，读者可以根据简单的叙述对情感推断进行编码，并将这些推断编码到内容最少的长记忆中。此外，这些情绪推断可能是由一般叙事情境的特征激活的，而不仅仅是由其行为或经历引发推断的角色激活。这些结果表明，读者可以根据简单的叙述对情感推断进行编码，并将这些推断编码到内容最少的长记忆中。此外，这些情绪推断可能是由一般叙事情境的特征激活的，而不仅仅是由其行为或经历引发推断的角色激活。