Abstract
Introduction and objective : An experiment was conducted in a school context to examine whether joy and pride, two positive emotions, can promote children's acquisition of knowledge in a reading comprehension situation.Method : The experiment consisted of inducing either a positive emotion (i.e., joy, pride) or a neutral state to 10-year-old children using an autobiographical recall task. Once the induced state was evaluated, children were submitted to a reading/comprehension task of a neutral text. When they finished reading this text, a questionnaire was used to assess not only their memory of the information provided in the text, but also their ability to make inferences.Results : Our main results highlighted a positive effect of joy on children's inference making.Conclusion : This study confirmed the relevance of taking into account the emotional state of children engaged in knowledge acquisition situations at school.