How automatically do readers infer fictional characters' emotional states? Scientific

We propose that reading stories, such as a narrative about a character who takes money from a store where his best friend works and who later learns that his best friend has been fired, stimulates readers to activate the knowledge of how the charac ter feels when he finds out that his best friend has been fired from a job for something he did. In other words, we propose that readers infer fictional character's emotional states. In this article, we first review two series of laboratory experiments (Gerns bacher, Goldsmith, & Robertson, 1992; Gernsbacher & Robertson, 1992) that empiri cally tested this hypothesis by measuring participants ' reading times to target sen tences that contained emotion words that matched (e.g., guilt) or mismatched (e.g., pride) the implied emotional state. We then present a third series of laboratory experi ments that tested how automatically such knowledge is activated by using a divided attention task (tone-identification, per-sentence memory load, or cumulative memory load) and by comparing target-sentence reading time when the emotional state is ex plicitly mentioned versus only implicit. Several years ago, one of our colleagues (Douglas Hintzman) announced a collo quium that was to be given by a leading reading researcher (Alexander Pollatsek) in the following way: I asked Dr. Pollatsek to explain "reading. " He replied that it is a method that millions have used to gain enlightenment. Practitioners of this art ("readers, " as Pollatsek calls them) adopt a sitting position, and remain virtually motionless for long periods of time. They hold before their faces white sheets of paper covered with thousands o