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Some researchers claim that uncertainty prolongs the duration of emotional experiences because uncertainty toward an emotion-eliciting event prolongs attention to that event. However, some results contradict this claim. We assumed that curiosity rather than uncertainty prolongs the duration of emotional experience via attention, and that attention and emotional experience are prolonged only when uncertainty elicits curiosity. This assumption is based on the information gap theory, which proposes that curiosity increases with uncertainty, but that curiosity decreases at a certain level of uncertainty. We conducted a survey study to investigate the relationships among curiosity, uncertainty, attention and duration of positive and negative emotional experiences. The results showed that curiosity, but not uncertainty, prolonged the duration of emotional experiences and the process was completely mediated by attention both for positive and negative emotions. Moreover, uncertainty prolonged the duration of emotional experiences only when uncertainty elicited curiosity, which in turn prolonged attention to the emotion-eliciting event.

Cognitive complexity was measured in terms of dimensionality and articulation. How consistent they were between different measuring conditions was examined by correlating their measures with one another obtained from two sets of grids differing in constructs, objects (role persons), and tasks (rating vs. grouping).Measures of dimensionality were the modified Bieri's matching score, Scott's D, and Ware's percent of variance of the first principal component, and those of articulation, Bieri's matching score, Scott's C, and the number of groups. The main findings were as follows. (1) Dimensionality varied quite largely between two conditions differing in elements of grids, while articulation kept some coherence. (2) According to the results of split-half method, alternation of objects in a grid contributed more to fluctuation of dimensionality than of constructs.

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