Contextual Meaning-Making in Reading: The Role of Affect
Jana Lüdtke, Johanna K. Kaakinen, Arthur M. Jacobs · 2021
Emotions play a crucial role in how readers process, comprehend, and experience texts. This chapter focuses on what we have learned about emotional aspects of reading by using eye tracking, a methodology that provides detailed information about the time-course of reading processes as they occur online. The chapter first introduces basic emotion concepts relevant for reading research. It then describes key measures of eye movements used in previous research, focusing on sentence and text comprehension. We then briefly review previous eye tracking research on the role of emotions in reading conducted at three levels: word, sentence, and text. It appears that while word-level emotion effects have received quite a lot of attention, much less empirical work has been conducted on sentence and text-level phenomena. This lack of empirical evidence is reflected in a dearth of theoretical accounts, which currently are still under development. Thus, there is a clear need for vigorous empirical research to help advance theoretical work on emotional aspects of reading. This chapter highlights the importance of using naturalistic texts and the need for further development in advanced exploratory, predictive, and explanatory computational methods and models in order to foster understanding of the emotional aspects of reading.