Knowledge Activation Versus Sentence Mapping when Representing Fictional Characters' Emotional States

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Narrative Comprehension
• Psycholinguistics

Background:

• Readers construct mental representations of fictional characters' emotional states.
• Understanding these states involves activating relevant knowledge and mapping narrative information.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the distinct roles of knowledge activation and sentence mapping in representing fictional characters' emotions.
• To determine how story content influences emotional knowledge activation.

Main Methods:

• Participants read stories with manipulated emotional content and target sentences with emotion words.
• Experiment 1 used a density manipulation to isolate knowledge activation.
• Experiment 2 employed a proportionality manipulation to rule out strategy-based effects.

Main Results:

• Reading more emotional stories led to broader activation of emotional knowledge.
• Sentence mapping ease was influenced by the match between story-implied emotions and target emotion words.
• Results were not attributable to participant strategies.

Conclusions:

• Knowledge activation and sentence mapping are key processes in understanding fictional characters' emotions.
• The amount of emotional content in a narrative influences the extent of knowledge activation.