This study aimed at clarifying controversy over the nature of the disruptive influence of the emotional content of a text on 5th graders’ spelling performance in a dictation task: does the emotional content directly affects performance by an attention tropism or indirectly by inducing an emotional state congruent with its valence? Fartoukh et al. (2014) replicated results from Cuisinier et al.’s (2010) showing a detrimental influence of the emotional content however they disagreed as to the explanation of this effect. To disentangle this controversy, we used part of the method of both studies and examined the effect of joy induced through autobiographical recall on performance with a neutral text. Although induction modified children emotional state it did not influence their performance, whereas the joyful text did not modify children’s emotional state but had a detrimental influence on their performance. The joyful text was better recalled (free recall) than the neutral text. These findings point towards a direct influence of the emotional content of a text.