Schedule of Events | Symposia

Emotion behind Narratives: How do adolescents perceive emotion during fiction reading? An EEG study.

Poster Session D - Monday, March 31, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Panlin Lee¹ (panlin6363@gmail.com), Wen Jui Kuo¹; ¹National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University

Theory of Mind is a cognitive ability to predict people's actions by understanding their perceptions and beliefs. It is important not only for social interaction but also for reading comprehension. Eye gazes can effectively convey emotions. While directed gazes are often interpreted as positive, averted ones are more negative. To what extent emotions derived from reading can affect gaze emotion interpretation in adolescents, we invited 50 students to participate in this study. This study included behavioral and EEG measurements. Behavioral assessments include “Reading the Mind in the Eyes test (REMT)”, and “Interpersonal Reactivity Index Questionnaire (IRI)”. For EEG measurement, we prepared 72 fiction stories with positive (36) and negative (36) emotions from 6 literature. Participants were asked to read, focusing on the emotion conveyed by the story, and to rate the character’s emotional state and arousal. Each story is followed by a gaze photo, with direct or averted ones. For behavioral measurements, the IRI scores showed significant differences among three age groups. During fiction reading, participants rated negative stories as having higher arousal than positive stories. ERP analysis showed significant story and gaze interaction over the electrodes distributed in left anterior regions at 300-400 msec. Significant story effects were over right anterior and left posterior regions at 700-800 msec. Our findings indicated that the emotions derived from the stories could interact with gaze at an early stage in left frontal regions. The story’s emotional effects could last for longer and seemed to be hosted by wildly distributed brain networks.

Topic Area: EMOTION & SOCIAL: Emotion-cognition interactions