Curiosity about a positive or negative event prolongs the duration of emotional experience

Abstract

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.

La curiosité du consommateur : synthèse bibliométrique et bibliographique

“…La curiosité spécifique reste donc peu mesurable, surtout dans le cadre commercial, ce qui est vrai aussi via les mesures comportementales. (2) Les recherches antérieures en psychologie ont montré que lorsqu'un individu est curieux il pose des questions, manipule des objets (Jacob, 2002 : 89), lit attentivement, examine les images (Silvia, 2005), et persiste à accomplir sa tâche (Sansone et Smith, 2000) ce qui prolonge la durée des expériences (Kaneko et al, 2018). Ces indications peuvent être utilisées dans le cadre commercial en mesurant par exemple le temps passé sur une page en ligne ou dans un point de vente mais une liste plus complète et particulièrement adaptée au cadre commercial permettrait de définir d'autres comportements de curiosité comme la prise en considération de diverses sources d'informations, la lecture approfondie de caractéristiques techniques d'un produit, l'utilisation conjointe du smartphone et des informations sur le point de vente.…”

Incidental Emotions and Hedonic Forecasting: The Role of (Un)certainty

“…Participants responded to six items measuring prediction task uncertainty (α = 0.79), adjusted from Kaneko et al (2018) . These items are based on Wilson and Gilbert’s (2008) definition of uncertainty, or the lack of it, according to three aspects of understanding: causes, nature, and implications.…”

“…Uncertainty toward an emotional event (i.e., a prediction task) prolongs attention to that event ( Kaneko et al, 2018 ). Attention was therefore operationalized in terms of its span.…”

“…We expected the attention drawn by the decision task to manifest itself in the amount of time participants would remain concentrated on it, even after its completion, and before diverting to some other event. Specifically, participants responded to the following items (1 = not at all, 7 = very much):“After I finished the prediction of how much I will like the music next week, it retained my attention for a long time”; “After my prediction had finished, I thought about it for a long time”; and “After my prediction, I forgot about it immediately.” The third item was reverse scored (α = 0.75; adjusted from Kaneko et al, 2018 ).…”

Augmenting training–learning experience by design: a conceptual framework

“…Curiosity propels an individual to seek further information to satisfy his/her drive to know (Berlyne, 1954) and often manifests in the process of exploration. This exploration is because of attention on the episode eliciting curiosity and is known to prolong the emotional experiences (Verduyn et al , 2009, 2011; Kaneko et al , 2018). This process of exploration can be explained in the context of training and learning through the gap theory of curiosity (Loewenstein, 1994).…”