A study of how university students understand multiple emotions the characters expresses in narratives:

From the perspective of the differences in reading time

Abstract

This study explored the understanding of multiple emotions expressed by characters in narratives. Previous studies have shown that university students read and understand texts adequately when a character expresses only one emotion at one time. One might also hypothesize that students would be able to identify and comprehend text in which a character expresses more than one emotion at one time. By changing the wording of the target sentences,we developed three conditions for use in this study. These conditions,differing in the degree to which the text was congruent with the context in which it was embedded,consisted of:1)matched,2)less-matched,and 3)mismatched conditions. The reading times under each condition were measured in a sample of fifty-one female university students. The results showed longer reading times under the mismatched condition and no differences in reading times between the matched and less-matched conditions;the latter two conditions did not involve the sort of lengthy reading times obtained under the mismatched condition. These results suggest that university students can also adequately understand emotions that are less congruent with the context in which they are embedded.