ABSTRACT

In our current era, learners are confronted with many and varying sources of information, such as news media, books, websites, social media, scientific articles, communicative interactions, and more. In addition, individuals must learn from such sources, making it important to critically examine the factors underlying learning from text and discourse. Importantly, the valence and activation of readers’ emotions can influence the quality of readers’ processing, which could help or hinder the learner’s ability to understand and learn from text related to important issues. Although theoretical and empirical work documents the role of emotions in learning and motivation, reading- and discourse-specific models are needed. At present, the literature examining reading presents conflicting findings related to the influence of emotion on textual processing. However, asproposed in the Process, Emotion, Task (PET) framework, the discrepant findings related to reading processes may be explained by interactions between specific reader emotions and the type of task. Hence, examining both emotions and features of the text are critical when considering how to support readers’ ability to comprehend, evaluate, and learn from text. This article introduces a special issue of Discourse Processes that brings together experts engaging in empirical studies on how emotion influences learning and processing for varying text types in different contexts. Our goal is to further work toward developing a more cohesive understanding of the influence of reader emotions in supporting learning, comprehension, processing, and conceptual change and to draw important connections to the broader fields of text and discourse, learning, and motivation. Such connections are critical for improving learning experiences across a variety of settings and enhancing the relevance of discourse-processing research.

摘要

在当今时代，学习者面临着许多不同的信息来源，例如新闻媒体、书籍、网站、社交媒体、科学文章、交流互动等等。此外，个人必须从这些资源中学习，因此批判性地检查从文本和话语中学习的因素非常重要。重要的是，读者情绪的效价和激活会影响读者处理的质量，这可能有助于或阻碍学习者理解和学习与重要问题相关的文本的能力。尽管理论和实证工作记录了情绪在学习和动机中的作用，但仍需要阅读和话语特定的模型。目前，研究阅读的文献对情绪对文本处理的影响提出了相互矛盾的发现。然而，在过程、情绪、任务（PET）框架中，与阅读过程相关的差异发现可以通过特定读者情绪和任务类型之间的相互作用来解释。因此，在考虑如何支持读者理解、评估和从文本中学习的能力时，检查文本的情感和特征是至关重要的。本文介绍一期特刊Discourse Processes汇集了从事实证研究的专家，研究情绪如何影响不同上下文中不同文本类型的学习和处理。我们的目标是进一步努力发展对读者情绪在支持学习、理解、处理和概念变化方面的影响的更有凝聚力的理解，并与更广泛的文本和话语、学习和动机领域建立重要联系。这种联系对于改善各种环境中的学习体验和增强话语处理研究的相关性至关重要。