Data_Sheet_6_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.

面部肌电图研究显示，皱眉肌（皱眉肌肉）的活动与语言刺激的情感价值保持一致。基于实证或具身语言处理的理论认为，此类活动反映了情感的模拟或“重演”，作为检索词义（例如，“愤怒”）和/或构建情境模型（例如，“马克很愤怒”）的一部分。然而，同一肌肉亦表达了我们遇到事物的初级情感评价。由语言驱动的情感模拟可能与读者对语言描述的情感评价（例如，当我们喜欢马克愤怒时）相矛盾。在先前的研究（‘t Hart 等人，2018年）中，我们证明了仅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中出现的皱眉肌模式。这些结果支持了皱眉肌活动多重驱动因素的理论，其中模拟和评价过程共同作用于皱眉肌的激活模式。当前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可用进行更精细的控制，我们再次发现结果反对仅从模拟或评价的角度解释皱眉肌活动，从而支持多重驱动因素理论。额外证据表明，涉及的模拟驱动因素反映的是在构建情境模型层面的模拟，而非从长期记忆中检索概念层面的模拟。总的来说，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结合，本研究有助于我们理解情感语言理解。