Abstract:  Emotion comprehension is of great significance for discourse comprehension and it is widely studied in psycholinguistics. Previous studies demonstrated that readers infer emotional information in discourse on-line and automatically. What’s more, readers can keep track of emotional change in discourse and update their situation model accordingly. Recently, some empirical ERP studies and related discourse comprehension theories showed that at least two processes are involved in emotion comprehension in discourse: one is the monitoring of emotional information and the other is the evaluation and updating of current emotional information. Related fMRI studies suggested that emotion comprehension in discourse activated not only emotion network, but also other networks, such as narrative comprehension network and theory of mind (ToM) network. In the future, more studies are needed to explore the influential factors of emotion comprehension and its cognitive neural mechanisms. The findings can be useful for the studies of emotion computing.

Key words:  discourse, emotion comprehension, cognitive processes, neural mechanism