中  華  心  理  學  刊
民93，46卷，2期，171-179

Mei-Hsiu Chen（Institude of Linguistics, National Chung-Cheng University, Taiwan）

Abstract

Each of the short experimental stories was intended to induce readers to represent a different emotional state, though each emotional state was implied. After the main body of each story, an additional sentence containing an emotion word was presented as a target sentence. The matching and mismatching words were only opposite in their affective valence (positive vs. negative), and were counterbalanced across stories. The results showed that target sentences with mismatching emotion words were read considerably more slowly. This suggests that although Chinese and English differ in fundamental ways, Chinese readers do also mentally represent characters; emotional states. And compared with the results of Gernsbacher, Goldsmith, and Robertson (1992), Chinese readers are more strongly affected by situational models, including the emotional states of characters.

Keywords：emotional state, situational model, reading comprehension, fictional character