![College of Science and Health Theses and Dissertations](../../assets/md5images/ab4d736dbb704affb05cf70b9918ab2e.jpg)
Date of Award
Summer 8-20-2017
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
Department
Psychology
First Advisor
Sandra Virtue, PhD
Second Advisor
Joseph Mikels, PhD
Abstract
During reading, individuals often need to activate mental representations of a character’s emotional state. Currently, little is known about how readers infer positive and negative character emotional states. Furthermore, the selective involvement of the two cerebral hemispheres in generating emotional inferences is unclear. In the current study, participants read texts that primed either a positive (Experiment 1) or negative (Experiment 2) emotion of a character in a text. Using a divided visual-field paradigm, participants performed a lexical decision task for target words congruent with the character’s emotional state, which were presented to either the left visual field-right hemisphere or right visual field-left hemisphere. Results showed significant priming in both hemispheres for negative emotion inferences. The pattern from the current study suggests a negativity bias, in which readers are faster to infer negative character emotions from a text than positive character emotions. Furthermore, these results suggest that both the right and left hemisphere are highly involved in generating negative emotion inferences from a text
Recommended Citation
Tomkins, Blaine, "Inferring Character Emotions During Text Comprehension: A Divided Visual Field Study" (2017). College of Science and Health Theses and Dissertations. 223.
https://via.library.depaul.edu/csh_etd/223
SLP Collection
no