Okay, so Athena was checking her E-Mail, (I had just made a new gen.) and it was a proposal. Right before she opened it, I praised her, and then the action flipped from 'Reading E-Mail' to this:

Checking email is an action that you initiate, so praising for that is fruitless.

Athena was just telling you that the praise you just gave her for checking email was ineffective