The role of affect in narratives

Affect states and reactions commonly occur in norrotives. This paper discusses the importance of affect knowledge ond processing in the context of BORIS, a computer progrom which reads and answers questions about narratives in-volving multiple sources of knowledge. There are several reasons why affects are important in a process model of narrative comprehension: For one thing, affects describe goal situations and signal the occurrence of expectation fail-ures. Affective reactions also serve as on indication of the status of interper-sonal relationships. Finally, affects influence the kinds of thematic structures which become instantiated in episodic memory. 1