Burgess, Andrea N.; Hughes-Berheim, Sarah S.; Cutting, Laurie E. (2026).听.听Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 79, 101707.听
Most brain-based models of reading focus on a network of regions in the left side of the brain that help us understand words, sentences, and whole texts, but they tend to ignore the role of emotion. In reality, emotional factors鈥攅specially聽arousal聽(how intense or exciting a word or phrase feels)鈥攃an influence how we process what we read. While earlier brain imaging studies have shown that emotional words or full passages can activate areas involved in both emotion and understanding a story (sometimes called building a 鈥渟ituation model,鈥� or a mental picture of what鈥檚 happening), it has been unclear how smaller units, like phrases within a passage, affect the brain. It is also not well understood how differences between individuals in responding to emotional intensity might relate to reading ability, particularly in children.
In this study, researchers used聽functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)鈥攁 technique that measures brain activity by tracking blood flow鈥攖o examine how 86 third-grade students processed emotional content while reading. They analyzed how changes in emotional intensity at the phrase level (based on ratings from a standardized word database) influenced brain activity as the children read full passages. The results showed that more emotionally intense phrases led to increased activity in several brain regions involved in emotion and understanding context, including the聽amygdala聽(important for processing emotions), the聽striatum聽(linked to motivation and reward), the聽posterior insula(involved in internal bodily and emotional awareness), and the聽dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC)聽(a region associated with thinking about situations and making sense of narratives). Importantly, greater activity in the dmPFC was also linked to better reading comprehension skills.
Overall, the findings suggest that emotional intensity within a text plays a meaningful role in how the brain processes language, even at the level of individual phrases. This highlights the importance of including emotional factors in models of reading and suggests that using more emotionally engaging reading materials could help improve comprehension, especially for children who are still developing their reading skills.
Fig. 1.听Sample stimuli presentation. As an attention check, children were asked to indicate consecutively repeated stimuli using a thumb button press. Not pictured is the blank screen (variable jitter) between each stimulus.