The Emotional Impact Of Verbal Irony Analysis

Ruth Filik’s article “The Emotional Impact of Verbal Irony: Eye-tracking evidence for a two-stage process” explores people’s emotional processing of verbal irony, specifically sarcasm. The article investigates a reader’s emotional response to a short story in which a character receives either sarcastic or explicit criticism. At the end of the anecdote, the reader is made aware of either the critic’s motivations behind the critique or the victim’s emotional response to the criticism. The goal is to reveal how people process characters’ emotional responses to criticism and how that is influenced by people’s own perception of irony. There were two experiments done. The first experiment consisted of a set-up with 32 experimental items, short stories …show more content…
This indicated that the reader more easily understood the victim’s hurt. However, by the middle of the target sentence the reader integrated the character’s hurt response to ironic criticism more slowly than literal criticism, indicated by overall slower reading times for the target sentence after the critical emotion word. This would suggest that readers initially thought the victim was more likely to be hurt following ironic criticism rather than literal criticism. However, by the end of the sentence the reader integrates the victim’s hurt response more slowly because they view the critique as less hurtful and more humorous. The results of experiment two are that if the amused emotion was portrayed by the protagonist, the reading time was shorter than when the amused emotion was portrayed by the victim. Also, the reader more easily integrated a victim’s perspective of amusement following ironic criticism. This would suggest that readers thought the protagonist would be more likely to portray an amused response upon criticizing the victim and that the reader finds the ironic critiques to be humorous. The explicit findings of this study indicate that a reader’s first emotional reactions to the critique and expectations of the critic’s motivations change following ironic criticism, …show more content…
The first experiment had 22 female participants and 6 male participants while the second experiment had 23 female participants and 5 male participants. This overwhelming majority of female participants could have biased the data, leading to results and discussion that account for how women integrate emotional responses to ironic and literal criticism as opposed to both males and females. In addition, even though their interpretation of the data seems to correspond with the results of the study, their argument would have been strengthened with the inclusion of data from a question or scale after each experimental item that recorded the participants’ perspectives of their emotional response to each item. If this additional data were to correspond with the results of the studies, then the reasoning behind the processing course of irony would be more clearly substantiated. In addition, these experiments had the reader as an objective viewer of the ironic and literal criticism. The article should make it clear that their results only portray how a third party would respond emotionally to observing literal versus ironic criticism. Therefore, this experiment investigates the emotional processing of criticism when the reader is not directly engaged in the situation. The emotional processing of criticism may differ greatly if the reader himself or their close friend or family member is receiving the ironic or explicit criticism. Because only