Gernsbacher Morton Ann, Robertson Rachel R W
Department of Psychology, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon, U.S.A.
Lang Cogn Process. 1992;7(3-4):353-371. doi: 10.1080/01690969208409391.
We investigated the role that knowledge activation and sentence mapping play in how readers represent fictional characters' emotional states. The subjects read stories that described concrete actions, such as a main character stealing money from a store where his best friend worked and later learning that his friend had been fired. By manipulating the content of the stories (i.e. writing stories that implied different emotional states), we affected what emotional knowledge would be activated. Following each story, the subjects read a target sentence that contained an emotion word. By manipulating the emotion word in each target sentence (i.e. whether it matched mismatched the emotional state implied by the story), we affected how easily subjects could map the target sentence onto their developing mental structures. In Experiment 1, we further isolated the role of knowledge activation from the role of sentence mapping with a density manipulation. When the subjects read many emotional stories, they more widely activated their knowledge of emotional states. Using a proportionality manipulation in Experiment 2, we demonstrated that this result was not due to the subjects' strategies.
我们研究了知识激活和句子映射在读者如何表征虚构人物的情绪状态中所起的作用。受试者阅读描述具体行为的故事，比如一个主角从他最好的朋友工作的商店偷钱，后来得知他的朋友被解雇了。通过操纵故事的内容（即编写暗示不同情绪状态的故事），我们影响了哪些情绪知识会被激活。读完每个故事后，受试者阅读一个包含情绪词的目标句子。通过操纵每个目标句子中的情绪词（即它是否与故事所暗示的情绪状态相匹配或不匹配），我们影响了受试者将目标句子映射到其正在形成的心理结构上的难易程度。在实验1中，我们通过密度操纵进一步分离了知识激活的作用与句子映射的作用。当受试者阅读许多情感故事时，他们更广泛地激活了自己的情绪状态知识。在实验2中，我们使用比例操纵证明了这一结果并非由于受试者的策略。
