Emotion in Stories: Facial EMG Evidence for Both Mental Simulation and Moral Evaluation.

ABSTRACT: Facial electromyography research shows that corrugator supercilii ("frowning muscle") activity tracks the emotional valence of linguistic stimuli. Grounded or embodied accounts of language processing take such activity to reflect the simulation or "reenactment" of emotion, as part of the retrieval of word meaning (e.g., of "furious") and/or of building a situation model (e.g., for "Mark is furious"). However, the same muscle also expresses our primary emotional evaluation of things we encounter. Language-driven affective simulation can easily be at odds with the reader's affective evaluation of what language describes (e.g., when we like Mark being furious). To examine what happens in such cases, we independently manipulated simulation valence and moral evaluative valence in short narrativ

SUBMITTER: 't Hart B 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5937160 | biostudies-literature | 2018

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature