ABSTRACT
Emotions have been commonly defined in terms of the social-cultural context in which they occur (Fischer, 1991; Fridja, 1986): An emotional experience in a certain situation is a result of the way an individual assigns meaning to that situation. Most researchers have regarded this “appraisal process” as a form of cognition (Fischer, 1991; Fridja, 1986; Lazarus, 1982; Mandler, 1975; Ortony, Clore, & Collins, 1988; Scherer, 1982) and have argued that if the cognitive processing of a situation precedes and determines the emotional experience (see Fridja, 1986), the emotional experience itself may in turn influence cognitive processing. Therefore, emotions can trigger cognitive structures, sensitize people to certain types of information, and help them to determine what knowledge is relevant to the situation and what knowledge has to be activated (see Fridja, 1989; Tan, 1994). Emotions punctuate almost all of the significant events in our lives and should thus be considered as cues for determining the coherence of the situation. Because coherence is crucial when readers are processing language, text comprehension is one of the most critical domains in which researchers should take emotions into account. However, although some models of comprehension have attempted to propose a formal description of its structural and/or functional aspects (Gernsbacher, 1990; Kintsch, 1988; van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983; Zwaan & Magliano, & Graesser, 1995; Zwaan & Radvansky, 1998) in conventional stories (Tan, 1994) or in literary texts (Kneepkens & Zwaan, 1994), most authors have not provided us with a clear description of how and when emotions take effect in the reading compre-
hension process. One of the main reasons is probably that, despite their apparent familiarity, emotions are an extremely subtle and complex topic.
