The Influence Of Emotional Sensitivity And Protagonist's Emotional Shift On The Processing Of Misinformation In Discourse Reading

In narrative reading,the correction of misinformation is very difficult.Although there were not only refutation information in the story content to refute the misinformation,but also the correct information implicitly pointed to causal connection fit into the story theme,the subjects would still maintain the situational model related to the misinformation,and make a wrong inference about the theme of the story according to the misinformation,which was called continued influence effect of misinformation(Johnson & Seifert,1994).As an important dimension of situational model,emotion could promote the subjects to track the plot of a story(Gernsbacher,Goldsmith,& Robertson,1998;Zhongyi Lu,Xiaona Ba,& Xingfen Li,2012).At the same time,the individual differences of emotional sensitivity could also affect the subjects' memory of emotional information in the story(Bloise & Johnson,2007).This study examined how the protagonist's emotional shift in the story and emotional sensitivity of the subjects affected the processing of misinformation.First,in Experiment 1,in order to investigate whether the semantic relevance of misinformation and context affects the correction of misinformation,based on the spontaneous reasoning paradigm of Wilkes and Leatherbarrow(1988),60 participants were selected,using a single factor two levels(direct correction conditions,Control conditions)Experimental design.Comparing the differences in the inference results of the subjects under different conditions,it was found that the subjects were still affected by the misinformation during the extraction process,that is,referring to the misinformation for reasoning.In Experiment 2,In order to investigate how the protagonist's emotional shift and emotional sensitivity of subjects affect the processing of misinformation correction,60 subjects were selected,using 2(the protagonist emotional shift: with,without)× 2(emotional sensitivity: high,low)Mixed experimental design.Through eye movement measurement,it was found that subjects with different emotional sensitivities have different time to process emotional shift information and misinformation.The protagonist's emotional shift not only promoted the reprocessing of misinformation by subjects with high emotional sensitivity,Also weakened the tendency of subjects with high emotional sensitivity to reason based on misinformation.In Experiment 3,In order to investigate whether the emotional shift with causal explanation could cause the subjects to track the causal relationship of the story event,so as to correct the misinformation.62 subjects were selected,and a mixed experimental design of 2(protagonist emotion shift: emotion shift with causal explanation,no emotion shift)× 2(emotional sensitivity: high and low)was used.On the basis of Experiment 2,it was further found that when causal explanations were added,the subjects' tendency to reason based on the correct information increased.The real-time processing of correct information by subjects was affected by individual differences in emotional sensitivity.The more sensitive subjects were to emotional information,the more they would reintegrate the information related to emotional shift(for example,misinformation,correct Information).In a word,through three experiments,this study found that the protagonist's emotional shift and emotional sensitivity can affect the correction of misinformation,especially after adding causal explanation,the protagonist's emotional shift could promote the subjects with high emotional sensitivity to reprocess the correct information,and further promote the correction of misinformation.