How valence affects language processing: Negativity bias and mood congruence in narrative comprehension

The present research examined how positive and negative moods affect readers’ understanding of positive and negative story endings. It demonstrated how negativity bias and mood congruence emerge during narrative comprehension. Participants were induced to experience either a positive or a negative mood and then read stories that could have either a positive or a negative ending. In Experiment 1, participants took longer to integrate negative endings than positive endings, independent of their mood. In Experiment 2, participants judged as more surprising those endings that did not match their mood. The present results illustrate that ending valence has strong influence on moment-by-moment reading, but that readers’ moods influence expectations for story outcomes once readers reflect on a complete representation of the story.

[1]  J. Forgas.  On being happy and mistaken: mood effects on the fundamental attribution error. , 1998, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[2]  Joseph P. Forgas,et al.  Asking Nicely? The Effects of Mood on Responding to More or Less Polite Requests , 1998 .

[3]  J. Cacioppo,et al.  Negative information weighs more heavily on the brain: The negativity bias in evaluative categorizations. , 1998 .

[4]  P. Watkins.  Implicit memory bias in depression , 2002 .

[5]  R. Gerrig,et al.  Readers’ reality-driven and plot-driven analyses in narrative comprehension , 2002, Memory & cognition.

[6]  T. Trabasso,et al.  Inferences during Reading: Converging Evidence from Discourse Analysis, Talk-Aloud Protocols, and Recognition Priming , 1993 .

[7]  P. Watkins,et al.  Unconscious memory bias in depression: perceptual and conceptual processes. , 2000, Journal of abnormal psychology.

[8]  G. Bower,et al.  Mood effects on person-perception judgments. , 1987, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[9]  Roger Ratcliff,et al.  Inference during reading. , 1992 .

[10]  Klaus Fiedler,et al.  Us and them: Mood effects on intergroup discrimination. , 1996 .

[11]  Klaus Fiedler,et al.  On the Task, the Measures and the Mood in Research on Affect and Social Cognition , 1991 .

[12]  C. H. Hansen,et al.  Finding the face in the crowd: an anger superiority effect. , 1988, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[13]  David W Allbritton,et al.  Participatory responses in text understanding , 1991 .

[14]  Jeff T. Larsen,et al.  May I have your attention, please: Electrocortical responses to positive and negative stimuli , 2003, Neuropsychologia.

[15]  G. Radvansky,et al.  Goal coordination in narrative comprehension , 2001, Psychonomic bulletin & review.

[16]  Jason E. Albrecht,et al.  Role of context in accessing distant information during reading. , 1995, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[17]  G. Peeters,et al.  Positive-Negative Asymmetry in Evaluations: The Distinction Between Affective and Informational Negativity Effects , 1990 .

[18]  O. John,et al.  Automatic vigilance: the attention-grabbing power of negative social information. , 1991, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[19]  L. Berkowitz,et al.  On the correction of feeling-induced judgmental biases. , 2000 .

[20]  Dinkar Sharma,et al.  Intrusive Cognitions: An Investigation of the Emotional Stroop Task , 1995 .

[21]  G. Bower.  Mood and memory. , 1981, The American psychologist.

[22]  T. Kusumi,et al.  The effect of a protagonist’s emotional shift on situation model construction , 2006, Memory & cognition.

[23]  Richard J. Gerrig,et al.  Readers' experiences of characters' goals and actions. , 2006, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[24]  Edward J.O’Brien and Jerome L.Myers.  Text Comprehension: A View From the Bottom Up , 1999 .

[25]  J. Forgas.  Mood and judgment: the affect infusion model (AIM). , 1995, Psychological bulletin.

[26]  Morton Ann Gernsbacher,et al.  Do Readers Mentally Represent Characters' Emotional States? , 1992, Cognition & emotion.

[27]  G. Clore,et al.  Mood, misattribution, and judgments of well-being: Informative and directive functions of affective states. , 1983 .

[28]  Zachary Estes,et al.  Automatic vigilance for negative words is categorical and general , 2008 .

[29]  Richard J. Gerrig,et al.  Predilections for narrative outcomes: The impact of story contexts and reader preferences , 2006 .

[30]  Stephen G. Gilligan,et al.  Selectivity of learning caused by affective states. , 1981 .

[31]  Patrick T. Vargas,et al.  Mood effects on eyewitness memory: Affective influences on susceptibility to misinformation , 2005 .

[32]  H. Aarts,et al.  On Wildebeests and Humans , 2003, Psychological science.

[33]  Jerome L. Myers,et al.  Accessing Distant Text Information during Reading: Effects of Contextual Cues. , 1998 .

[34]  Maryanne Martin.  On the induction of mood , 1990 .

[35]  K. Vohs,et al.  Case Western Reserve University , 1990 .

[36]  P. Herr,et al.  Effects of Word-of-Mouth and Product-Attribute Information on Persuasion: An Accessibility-Diagnosticity Perspective , 1991 .

[37]  J. Forgas.  On mood and peculiar people : affect and person typicality in impression formation , 1992 .

[38]  Edward B. Royzman,et al.  Negativity Bias, Negativity Dominance, and Contagion , 2001 .

[39]  Gordon H. Bower,et al.  Mood and Social Memory , 2000 .

[40]  Steven L. Small,et al.  Repetition Suppression for Spoken Sentences and the Effect of Task Demands , 2006, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[41]  Richard J. Gerrig,et al.  The Scope of Memory-Based Processing , 2005 .

[42]  Gordon H. Bower,et al.  Affect, memory, and social cognition. , 2000 .

[43]  J. Adelman,et al.  Automatic vigilance for negative words in lexical decision and naming: comment on Larsen, Mercer, and Balota (2006). , 2008, Emotion.

[44]  Klaus Fiedler,et al.  Affective states trigger processes of assimilation and accommodation , 2001 .

[45]  D. Williamson,et al.  Mood-congruent memory in depression: emotional priming or elaboration? , 1992, Journal of abnormal psychology.

[46]  Corby K. Martin,et al.  Unconscious Memory Bias in Depression: Perceptual and Conceptual Processes , 2000 .

[47]  J. Cacioppo,et al.  Beyond Bipolar Conceptualizations and Measures: The Case of Attitudes and Evaluative Space , 1997, Personality and social psychology review : an official journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc.

[48]  David N. Rapp,et al.  Integrating Memory-Based and Constructionist Processes in Accounts of Reading Comprehension , 2005 .

[49]  Joseph P. Forgas,et al.  On feeling good and getting your way: mood effects on negotiator cognition and bargaining strategies. , 1998, Journal of personality and social psychology.