Hi everyone,

This week we have two external speakers giving a presentation. First, social and political psychologist Ruthie Pliskin (Leiden University) will give a talk (topic still a surprise). Second, Cognitive neuroscientist Jos van Berkum (University of Utrecht) will give a talk titled “Emotion in discourse: Simulation evaluation, and more?”. Below the abstract of his talk + two references that you could read before the presentation (if interested).

As usual, we will meet at 15:00 in the Common Room (B9.22).

Best,

Maaike

Maaike Homan

PhD Candidate at the Political Science Department

Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research

University of Amsterdam

Room B10.01

Emotion in discourse: Simulation, evaluation, and more?

Language is a powerful combinatorial code for reference. However, that code is used to ‘get things done’ in the world, and, therefore, often used to talk about emotion -- our own as well as that of others. This presents a highly interesting puzzle. On the one hand, embodied language processing research suggests that when reading a word like “frustrated”, or “Mark is frustrated”, people use their emotion systems to simulate lexical and referential meaning (e.g., to imagine Mark’s emotion). On the other hand, though, readers usually have their own evaluative feelings about what is being referred to, e.g., whether a particular situation is fair (cf. “the bully is frustrated”). How does the secondary, derived use of our emotion systems to simulate conceptual and/or referential linguistic meaning combine with the primary, natural use of our emotion systems in evaluating what people tell us? Do both occur simultaneously? To explore this, we have used EMG-recordings over the frowning muscle, as readers process fictional narratives. Our first results fit the simultaneity idea: readers frown more to “Mark is frustrated” than “Mark is happy” when Mark is a morally good person, but not when Mark is bad. However, important theoretical alternatives are still on the table. For example, reduced identification with bad protagonists might lead to weaker language-driven simulation and/or weaker emotional mimicry (contagion). In the talk, I will not only discuss empirical studies, but will also use (an EMG-customized version of) the Affective Language Comprehension model to illustrate the complexity that we are facing in this type of work.

't Hart, B., et al. (2019). Tracking affective language comprehension: Simulating and evaluating character affect in morally loaded narratives. Frontiers in Psychology, 10.

't Hart, B., et al. (2018). Emotion in Stories: Facial EMG Evidence for Both Mental Simulation and Moral Evaluation. Frontiers in Psychology, 9.