Tracking Affective Language Comprehension: Simulating and Evaluating Character Affect in Morally Loaded Narratives.

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 "re-enactment" 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). In a previous experiment ('t Hart et al., 2018) we demonstrated that neither language-driven simulation nor affective evaluation alo

SUBMITTER: 't Hart B 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6398452 | biostudies-literature | 2019

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature