Abstract
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.
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The present research was based on work supported by National Science Foundation Grant 0325188. The preparation of this manuscript was supported by the John Templeton Foundation.
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Egidi, G., Gerrig, R.J. How valence affects language processing: Negativity bias and mood congruence in narrative comprehension. Memory & Cognition 37, 547–555 (2009). https://doi.org/10.3758/MC.37.5.547
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/MC.37.5.547