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Pragmatic Competence Modulates Counterfactual Emotion Processing: Eye-Tracking Evidence from Mandarin Chinese
Haoyun Dai1, Yanhao Xu1, Jing Bian1
1School of Foreign Languages and Cultures, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing 210023, China.
Behavioral Sciences (Basel, Switzerland)
|July 28, 2026
Summary
Readers process counterfactual emotions like regret and relief during language comprehension. Relief is processed faster than regret, and pragmatic competence aids regret detection.
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Cognitive Psychology
- Neuroscience
Background:
- Counterfactual thinking about "what might have been" evokes emotions like regret and relief.
- Understanding how these emotions are processed during real-time language comprehension is limited.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate how native Chinese readers infer counterfactual emotions during narrative comprehension.
- To examine the role of pragmatic competence in modulating the processing of counterfactual emotions.
Main Methods:
- An eye-tracking study was conducted with native Chinese readers.
- Participants read stories with counterfactual scenarios, followed by emotion words.
- Reading times were analyzed to assess online emotional inference and consistency detection.
Main Results:
- Mismatched emotion words in counterfactual contexts led to longer reading times, indicating rapid emotion inference.
- An early processing advantage for relief over regret was observed.
- Higher pragmatic competence was linked to earlier detection of regret-related inconsistencies.
Conclusions:
- Inferring regret requires more complex pragmatic processing than inferring relief.
- Chinese readers may exhibit an optimism bias in counterfactual thinking.
- Pragmatic competence selectively influences the detection of regret-related emotional mismatches.
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