Previous studies on emotion classification mainly focus on the emotional state of the writer. By contrast, our research emphasizes emotion detection from the readers' perspective. The classification of documents into reader-emotion categories can be applied in several ways, and one of the applications is to retain only the documents that trigger desired emotions to enable users to retrieve documents that contain relevant contents and at the same time instill proper emotions. However, current information retrieval (IR) systems lack the ability to discern emotions within texts, and the detection of reader’s emotion has yet to achieve a comparable performance. Moreover, previous machine learning-based approaches generally use statistical models that are not in a human-readable form. Thereby, it is difficult to pinpoint the reason for recognition failures and understand the types of emotions that the articles inspired on their readers. In this paper, we propose a flexible emotion template-based approach (TBA) for reader-emotion detection that simulates such process in a human perceptive manner. TBA is a highly automated process that incorporates various knowledge sources to learn an emotion template from raw text that characterize an emotion and are comprehensible for humans. Generated templates are adopted to predict reader’s emotion through an alignment-based matching algorithm that allows an emotion template to be partially matched through a statistical scoring scheme. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach can effectively detect reader’s emotions by exploiting the syntactic structures and semantic associations in the context, while outperforming currently well-known statistical text classification methods and the stat-of-the-art reader-emotion detection method.