Havas David A, Chapp Christopher B
Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, Whitewater WI, USA.
Department of Political Science, St. Olaf College, Northfield MN, USA.
Front Psychol. 2016 Jun 22;7:899. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00899. eCollection 2016.
How does language influence the emotions and actions of large audiences? Functionally, emotions help address environmental uncertainty by constraining the body to support adaptive responses and social coordination. We propose emotions provide a similar function in language processing by constraining the mental simulation of language content to facilitate comprehension, and to foster alignment of mental states in message recipients. Consequently, we predicted that emotion-inducing language should be found in speeches specifically designed to create audience alignment - stump speeches of United States presidential candidates. We focused on phrases in the past imperfective verb aspect ("a bad economy was burdening us") that leave a mental simulation of the language content open-ended, and thus unconstrained, relative to past perfective sentences ("we were burdened by a bad economy"). As predicted, imperfective phrases appeared more frequently in stump versus comparison speeches, relative to perfective phrases. In a subsequent experiment, participants rated phrases from presidential speeches as more emotionally intense when written in the imperfective aspect compared to the same phrases written in the perfective aspect, particularly for sentences perceived as negative in valence. These findings are consistent with the notion that emotions have a role in constraining the comprehension of language, a role that may be used in communication with large audiences.
语言如何影响大量受众的情绪和行为？从功能上讲，情绪通过约束身体以支持适应性反应和社会协调来帮助应对环境的不确定性。我们提出，情绪在语言处理中发挥类似的作用，即通过约束对语言内容的心理模拟来促进理解，并促进信息接收者心理状态的一致性。因此，我们预测在专门设计用于营造受众一致性的演讲中——美国总统候选人的竞选演讲中，会发现引发情绪的语言。我们关注过去未完成体动词时态中的短语（“糟糕的经济状况一直困扰着我们”），相对于过去完成体句子（“我们被糟糕的经济状况所困扰”），这类短语会使对语言内容的心理模拟具有开放性，因而不受约束。正如预测的那样，与完成体短语相比，未完成体短语在竞选演讲中相对于对照演讲中出现得更频繁。在随后的一项实验中，与用完成体时态书写的相同短语相比，参与者认为总统演讲中用未完成体时态书写的短语情感强度更高，尤其是对于那些在效价上被视为负面的句子。这些发现与情绪在约束语言理解中发挥作用的观点一致，这一作用可能在与大量受众的交流中被利用。
