Data_Sheet_5_Tracking Affective Language Comprehension: Simulating and Evaluating Character Affect in Morally Loaded Narratives.pdf

Facial electromyography research shows that corrugator supercilii (“frowning muscle”) activity tracks the emotional valence of linguistic stimuli. Grounded or embodied accounts of language processing take such activity to reflect the simulation or “re-enactment” of emotion, as part of the retrieval of word meaning (e.g., of “furious”) and/or of building a situation model (e.g., for “Mark is furious”). However, the same muscle also expresses our primary emotional evaluation of things we encounter. Language-driven affective simulation can easily be at odds with the reader’s affective evaluation of what language describes (e.g., when we like Mark being furious). In a previous experiment (‘t Hart et al., 2018) we demonstrated that neither language-driven simulation nor affective evaluation alone seem sufficient to explain the corrugator patterns that emerge during online language comprehension in these complex cases. Those results showed support for a multiple-drivers account of corrugator activity, where both simulation and evaluation processes contribute to the activation patterns observed in the corrugator. The study at hand replicates and extends these findings. With more refined control over when precisely affective information became available in a narrative, we again find results that speak against an interpretation of corrugator activity in terms of simulation or evaluation alone, and as such support the multiple-drivers account. Additional evidence suggests that the simulation driver involved reflects simulation at the level of situation model construction, rather than at the level of retrieving concepts from long-term memory. In all, by giving insights into how language-driven simulation meshes with the reader’s evaluative responses during an unfolding narrative, this study contributes to the understanding of affective language comprehension.

面部肌电图研究揭示了皱眉肌（皱眉肌）的活动与语言刺激的情感效价密切相关。基于情境或具身化的语言处理理论认为，此类活动反映了情感模拟或“重现”，它是词汇意义（例如“愤怒”）的检索以及构建情境模型（例如“马克很愤怒”）的一部分。然而，同一条肌肉也表达了我们对于所遭遇事物的初级情感评价。由语言驱动的情感模拟与读者对于语言所描述内容的情感评价（例如，当我们喜欢马克愤怒时）往往存在矛盾。在之前的一项实验（‘t Hart 等人，2018年）中，我们证明了仅凭语言驱动的模拟或情感评价本身似乎不足以解释在线语言理解过程中出现的皱眉肌模式。这些结果表明，支持了皱眉肌活动的多重驱动理论，其中模拟和评价过程共同作用于皱眉肌的激活模式。本研究旨在复制并扩展这些发现。通过对叙事中情感信息何时变得可用的精确控制，我们再次发现的结果反驳了仅从模拟或评价角度解释皱眉肌活动的观点，并因此支持了多重驱动理论。额外的证据表明，涉及到的模拟驱动反映的是在情境模型构建层面的模拟，而非从长期记忆中检索概念层面的模拟。总之，本研究通过揭示语言驱动的模拟如何与读者在叙事展开过程中的评价反应相融合，为情感语言理解的理解提供了洞见。