The emotional impact of verbal irony: Eye-tracking evidence for a two-stage process

•On-line methods reveal the time course of expected emotional responses to irony.•Ironic criticism is initially perceived as more hurtful than literal criticism.•Ironic criticism is later rationalized as being less hurtful, and more amusing.•Readers keep track of how characters' emotions may change over time.

In this paper we investigate the socio-emotional functions of verbal irony. Specifically, we use eye-tracking while reading to assess moment-to-moment processing of a character's emotional response to ironic versus literal criticism. In Experiment 1, participants read stories describing a character being upset following criticism from another character. Results showed that participants initially more easily integrated a hurt response following ironic criticism; but later found it easier to integrate a hurt response following literal criticism. In Experiment 2, characters were instead described as having an amused response, which participants ultimately integrated more easily following ironic criticism. From this we propose a two-stage process of emotional responding to irony: While readers may initially expect a character to be more hurt by ironic than literal criticism, they ultimately rationalize ironic criticism as being less hurtful, and more amusing.