Inferring character emotions during text comprehension: a negativity bias in both cerebral hemispheres

Little research has been conducted on how the two cerebral hemispheres are involved when readers generate inferences about the emotion of characters in a text. It is unclear how the cerebral hemispheres process inference-related information about text that is positively and negatively valenced. In the current study, participants read texts which promoted an inference about either a positive (Experiment 1) or negative (Experiment 2) emotional state of a character. Using the divided visual-field paradigm, participants performed a lexical decision task for target words consistent with the inferred character's emotional state, which were presented to either the left visual field-right hemisphere or the right visual field-left hemisphere. Results showed facilitation in both hemispheres when readers generated negatively-valenced character inferences, but no facilitation effects were found for positively-valenced character inferences. A negativity bias may be present in which readers more quickly infer negatively-valenced character emotions compared to positively-valenced character emotions in a text.