I’m Not Crying, You’re Crying: An Evaluation of the Impact of Emotional Text on Negation Comprehension

Abstract

Previous research has demonstrated that negated text (i.e., text that contains words such as no, not, or never) presents considerable challenges to accurate reading comprehension. Furthermore, while metacomprehension judgements have indicated an awareness of this challenge on the readers’ part, this insight has not translated into improvements in comprehension of this type of text. Previous research in reading has also demonstrated that emotional text, as compared to non-affective text, enhances attention to the text, resulting in accurate comprehension. The present study aimed to determine whether this strategy would impact negated text similarly. Results confirmed that negated text detrimentally impacted reading comprehension accuracy, and that overall, emotional text positively impacted comprehension accuracy. However, metacomprehension ratings suggested that while readers were aware of the increased difficulty presented by negated text, and also believed that emotion would help comprehension. Unfortunately, negation comprehension was not impacted by the affective nature of the text. These results indicate that negated text is sufficiently difficult to not benefit from the presence of emotion, and further investigation into improving comprehension of negated text is needed.

Keywords:

• Emotion
• metacomprehension
• negation
• reading comprehension

Acknowledgment

We would like to thank Phanessa Edmonds for her assistance in data collection.