Confronting a Paradox: A New Perspective of the Impact of Uncertainty in Suspense

Abstract

Suspense is a key narrative issue in terms of emotional gratifications. Reactions in response to this type of entertainment are positively related to enjoyment, having a significant impact on the audience's immersion and suspension of disbelief. Related to computational modeling of this feature, some automatic storytelling systems include limited implementations of suspense management system in their core. In this way, the interest of this subject in the area of creativity has resorted to different definitions from fields as narratology and the film industry, as much as several proposals of its constituent features. Among their characteristics, uncertainty is one of the most discussed in terms of impact and need: while many authors affirm that uncertainty is essential to evoke suspense, others limit or reject its influence. Furthermore, the paradox of suspense reflects the problem of including uncertainty as a component required in suspense creation systems. Due to this need to contrast the effects of the uncertainty in order to compute a general model for automatic storytelling systems, we conducted an experiment measuring suspense experienced by a group of subjects that read a story. While a group of them were told the ending of the story in advance, the members of the other group experimented the same story in chronological order. Both the subjects' reported suspense and their physiological responses are gathered and analyzed. Results provide evidence to conclude that uncertainty affects the emotional response of readers, but independently and in a different form than suspense does. It will help to propose a model in which uncertainty is processed separately as management of the amount of knowledge about the outcome available to the spectator, which acts as a control signal to modulate the input features, but not directly in suspense computing.

Modelling Suspense in Short Stories as Uncertainty Reduction over Neural Representation

“…In narratology, uncertainty over outcomes is traditionally seen as suspenseful (e.g., O'Neill, 2013;Zillmann, 1996;Abbott, 2008). Other authors claim that suspense can exist without uncertainty (e.g., Smuts, 2008;Hoeken and van Vliet, 2000;Gerrig, 1989) and that readers feel suspense even when they read a story for the second time (Delatorre et al, 2018), which is unexpected if suspense is uncertainty; this is referred to as the paradox of suspense (Prieto-Pablos, 1998;Yanal, 1996). Considering Romeo and Juliet again, in the first view suspense is motivated by primarily by uncertainty over what will happen.…”

The Impact of Context on Affective Norms: A Case of Study With Suspense

“…Part of these observations are in line with the general idea of suspense found in the relevant literature (Delatorre et al, 2016b): although the existing multiple definitions of suspense largely differ in the identification and importance of its fundamental features 1 (see Zillmann and Tannenbaum, 1980; Carroll, 1984; Ortony et al, 1990; Caplin and Leahy, 2001; Vorderer et al, 2001; Somanchi, 2003; Szilas, 2007; Abbott, 2008; Smuts, 2008, among others), there is a general agreement that suspense is triggered by the anticipation of an outcome which is mostly negative for the characters (Delatorre et al, 2018). This conceptualization can be found, for instance, in the definition by de Wied et al (1992, p. 325), that describe(s) suspense as “an anticipatory emotion, initiated by an event which sets up anticipations about a forthcoming (harmful) outcome event for one of the main characters.” Such a common approach seems consistent with the values of the affective dimensions reported by the participants of the aforementioned experiment: decreased valence and dominance, and increased arousal.…”

Unscripted Drama: Soccer Audience Response to Suspense, Surprise, and Shock

“…Delatorre et al () report an experiment where participants were shown a simple story displayed as a sequence of slides on a computer screen. The plot was whether a replacement organ would arrive in time to save the life of a dying child.…”