Paper
Timing Narrative Events: the Effect of Characters’ Emotions on Readers’ Estimations
- Authors:
- Smaragda Kazi; Stavroula Samartzi
- Abstract
- Time is a central topic in social sciences and humanities. Whereas it is well-known that subjective time is affected by emotion, i.e., the duration of “unhappy” real-life events is overestimated and the duration of “happy” events is underestimated, little is known about the effect of emotion on logical temporal reasoning. Our research focused on temporal reasoning in an everyday activity, that is, in reading. We investigated whether emotion evoked by texts influenced the estimation of the described events’ duration. Based on an original text, we constructed three a-temporal texts, aiming to trigger different emotional states to the readers: positive, negative, and flat emotions. The emotional valence of the texts was validated in a sample of 124 students. Participants were randomly placed in three groups, according to the type of text (Negative=40, Positive=44, and Flat=40 participants, respectively). Participants were also asked to estimate the duration of the described events in the text. Results showed that, although participants garnered emotional information from text, this did not affect their estimations of the narrative events’ duration. Our results reveal that, in contrast to real life, time estimations are not affected by emotion in the case of narrative events. These findings support the distinction between “subjective” and “logical” time. We postulate that when reading, an objective time line is created by the reader. It might be argued that the estimation of the subjective time resides at a first-order-representation (the reader represents, on a time line, the duration of the event, with him/herself being the agent). In contrast, the estimation of a logical-narrative time resides at a higher-order-representation level (the reader re-represents the events that are represented on a time line in the text). For skilled readers, such as the ones in our sample, the construction of the later representation resides at the implementation of reasoning procedures, which are activated even in the case of absence of any temporal markers in the text.
- Keywords
- Time Estimation; Temporal Reasoning; Narrative Events; Text Reading; Emotion
- StartPage
- 17
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