Cognitive engagement in emotional text reading: concurrent recordings of eye movements and head motion

ABSTRACT

The present study examined the effects of emotions on eye movements, head motion, and iPad motion during reading. Thirty-one participants read neutral, emotionally negative texts and emotionally positive texts on a digital tablet and both participants’ eye movements and body movements were recorded using respectively eye-tracking glasses and a motion capture system. The results showed that emotionally positive texts were read faster than neutral texts, and that readers’ movements decreased when reading emotional texts regardless of valence polarity. Recent studies suggested that postural movements may reflect cognitive engagement and especially the engagement in the task to be done. Our findings seem to validate this hypothesis of a bodily engagement in reading emotional contents. The present results suggest that the novel methodology of eye and postural movement recordings is informative in studying the readers’ embodied engagement during reading emotional materials.

KEYWORDS:

• Eye movements
• body motion
• emotional text
• cognitive engagement

TOPIC AREAS:

• Adult readers
• emotional processing
• human–computer interaction

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Ugo Ballenghein http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7430-2576

Olga Megalakaki http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8689-1742

Thierry Baccino http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2406-5306

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the E-READ COST action IS1404.