Abstract

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.

Highlights

  • One of the most enjoyable things about reading is that it allows us to walk a mile in the shoes of characters from the most amazing stories

  • 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

  • In a prior facial EMG study (‘t Hart et al, 2018), we explored this type of conflict by orthogonally manipulating languagedriven simulation and moral evaluation of characters within short narratives

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Summary

Introduction

One of the most enjoyable things about reading is that it allows us to walk a mile in the shoes of characters from the most amazing stories. Millions of readers have vicariously lived the life of the Machiavellian Queen Cersei from the Game of Thrones book series1 This vicarious experience of “walking a mile in another’s shoes” is more than just a figure of speech. Theories of grounded cognition hold that this is because in order to understand what we read, we simulate the meaning of words Simulation in these cases is taken to involve the neural reactivation of experiential, multimodal traces stored from previous experience with the referents described in the language (e.g., Barsalou, 2008). Mark is headed for a giant puddle and spots a pedestrian on the sidewalk

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