When you think about your experience reading your favorite book, what do you remember most? For many of us, it may be the emotions we felt when we read different parts of the story. Perhaps you felt nervous during a suspenseful part of the book, and sad during another.
Emotional simulation is our minds' ability to infer, or figure out, a character's emotional reaction to events in a story, and to feel this emotion ourselves.
Just like participants in the other study were faster to recognize images of a bird with outstretched wings when they heard a sentence like The ranger saw the bird in the sky, we might expect that readers may also be faster to recognize emotion words that match what the character is likely feeling. In one study, participants heard a story about a boy named Arthur.

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Go to source: https://kids.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/frym.2015.00015