Pragmatic Competence Modulates Counterfactual Emotion Processing: Eye-Tracking Evidence from Mandarin Chinese

Counterfactual thoughts about "what might have been" typically evoke emotions such as regret and relief, yet little is known about how such emotions are processed during real-time language comprehension. This eye-tracking study examined how native Chinese readers infer counterfactual emotions in narratives and whether pragmatic competence modulates this process. Participants read stories in which a character made a decision and subsequently experienced a positive or negative outcome; the final sentence was either consistent or inconsistent with the character's feeling of regret or relief. Emotion words that mismatched the counterfactual context elicited longer reading times than matching words, indicating rapid online inference and monitoring of the protagonist's emotions. Crucially, this emotional-consistency effect emerged earlier for relief than for regret (in first-pass reading times for relief but only in later eye-movement measures for regret), revealing an early processing advantage for relief. Moreover, individual differences in pragmatic competence selectively modulated inconsistency detection for regret but not relief: higher pragmatic competence was associated with greater early sensitivity to regret-related mismatches. These findings suggest that inferring regret places greater demands on higher-order pragmatic processing than relief and point to an optimism bias in counterfactual thinking among Chinese readers.