The Effect Of Protagonist's Emotion And Time Information Representation On The Situation Model Process

Text comprehension is a process that people construct mental representation of the information that the text described.And the mechanism of text comprehension has always been a hot issue for cognitive psychologists.Recently,the study of text reading is focused on the processing mechanism of situation model.Situation model,the deep-seated mental representation during reader's text comprehension,includes five dimensions:temporality, spatiality,causality,intentionlity,protagonist.Most psychological experts agreed that the construction and processing of situational model were the result of the interaction among five dimensions.Although the protagonist's emotions of the protagonist dimension play a very important role in the construction and processing of situational model,the experimental study on it is very little so far,therefore the primary purpose of this study is to explore the mechanism of the protagonist's emotions in the processing of situation model.As for the time dimension, the research was focused on the representation of temporal shift and temporal distance and confined to a single dimension.Actually,constructing and updating the situation model was influenced by multiple dimensions' acting.So the second purpose of this study is to combine the factors of protagonist's emotions,temporal shift,temporal distance,so to explore the effect of protagonist's emotions and time information representation on the situation model process.In this study,Experiment 1 used one-factor repeated measures experimental design method,Experiment 2 and Experiment 3 used two-factor repeated measures experimental design method,the texts as experimental materials,reading time of the critical sentence as the indices of dependent variable,three experiments were designed to explore the effect of protagonist's emotions and time information representation on the situation model process. Experiment 1 was single-factor within design,Experiment 2 and experiment 3 were 4×2 within design respectively.The results of experiment 1 indicated that the representation of the protagonist's emotions in text comprehension was on-line,and the processing of positive emotion was more easily than negative emotion.The results of experiment 2 indicated that temporal distance factor didn't affect the processing of protagonist's emotions.The results of experiment 3 indicated that when temporal shift became larger,the difficulties of reader's updating the information raised in the "worry-worry" condition of protagonist's emotions, however,the "worry-relief","relief-relief" and "relief-worry" conditions were not affected by temporal shift.In summary,the three experiments demonstrated that representation of the protagonist's emotions is on-line,and the processing of positive emotions is more easily than negative ones.Temporal distance factor does not affect the processing of protagonist's emotions,but temporal shift factor does affect the processing of protagonist's emotions.