Despite the well-known influence of emotional meaning on cognition, relatively less is known about its effects on reading behavior. We investigated whether fixation behavior during the reading of Chinese sentences is influenced by emotional word meaning in the parafovea. Two-character target words embedded into the same sentence frames provided…

Native languages are acquired in emotionally rich contexts, whereas foreign languages are typically acquired in emotionally neutral academic environments. As a consequence of this difference, it has been suggested that bilinguals' emotional reactivity in foreign-language contexts is reduced as compared with native language contexts. In the current…

Recent research has suggested that emotional sentences are understood by constructing an emotion simulation of the events being described. The present study aims to investigate whether emotion simulation is also involved in online and offline comprehension of larger language segments such as discourse. Participants read a target text describing…

In two experiments, 4- to 9-year-olds played a game in which they selected one of two boxes to win a prize. On "regret" trials the unchosen box contained a better prize than the prize children actually won, and on "baseline" trials the other box contained a prize of the same value. Children rated their feelings about their prize before and after…

The current research investigated the influence of body posture on adults' and children's perception of facial displays of emotion. In each of two experiments, participants categorized facial expressions that were presented on a body posture that was congruent (e.g., a sad face on a body posing sadness) or incongruent (e.g., a sad face on a body…

Rating the relevance of words for the imagined situation of being stranded in the grasslands without survival material leads to exceptionally good memory for these words. This survival processing effect has received much attention because it promises to elucidate the evolutionary foundations of memory. However, the proximate mechanisms of the…

The current research challenges the common view that positive affect and negative affect generate a broadened or narrowed attentional focus, respectively. Contrary to this view, two studies found that the link between affect and attentional focus as measured by a traditional flanker task (Study 1) and a modified flanker task (Study 2) reflects…

We examined the effect of background music on reading comprehension. Because the emotional consequences of music listening are affected by changes in tempo and intensity, we manipulated these variables to create four repeated-measures conditions: slow/low, slow/high, fast/low, fast/high. Tempo and intensity manipulations were selected to be…

Mood affects the way people think. But can the way people think affect their mood? In the present investigation, we examined this promising link by testing whether mood is influenced by the presence or absence of associative progression by manipulating the scope of participants' information processing and measuring their subsequent mood. In…

The authors examined the evolution of cognitive and emotional responses to terror risks for a nationally representative sample of Americans between late 2001 and late 2002. Respondents' risk judgments changed in ways consistent with their reported personal experiences. However, they did not recognize these changes, producing hindsight bias in…

Emotion words are generally characterized as possessing high arousal and extreme valence and have typically been investigated in paradigms in which they are presented and measured as single words. This study examined whether a word's emotional qualities influenced the time spent viewing that word in the context of normal reading. Eye movements…

We examined relations between the processing of facial identity and emotion in own- and other-race faces, using a fully crossed design with participants from 3 different ethnicities. The benefits of redundant identity and emotion signals were evaluated and formally tested in relation to models of independent and coactive feature processing and…

Research suggests that emotions influence children's ability to discern fantasy from reality; however, reasons for this association remain unknown. The current research sought to better understand the mechanisms underlying children's distinctions by examining the roles discrete emotions and context have in 3- to 5-year-olds' evaluations of fantasy…

In daily experience, children have access to a variety of cues to others' emotions, including face, voice, and body posture. Determining which cues they use at which ages will help to reveal how the ability to recognize emotions develops. For happiness, sadness, anger, and fear, preschoolers (3-5 years, N=144) were asked to label the emotion…

We investigated the processing of threat-related, positive, and neutral words in parafoveal and in foveal vision as a function of individual differences in trait anxiety. In a lexical-decision task, word primes were presented for 150 ms either parafoveally (2.2[degrees] away from fixation; Experiment 1) or foveally (at fixation; Experiment 3)…