TITLE:
Great Expectations—Narratives and the Elicitation of Aesthetic Chills
AUTHORS:
Felix Schoeller, Leonid Perlovsky
KEYWORDS:
Emotions, Aesthetic Chills, Expectations, Knowledge, Narratives, Meaning
JOURNAL NAME:
Psychology,
Vol.6 No.16,
December
29,
2015
ABSTRACT: We clarify the relation between the perception of narratives and aesthetic emotions by relating them to mechanisms of knowledge-acquisition. Stories elicit emotions by diverging from expectations one may formulate on the basis of their properties. The greater the divergence, the stronger the emotion. Models of emotions, expectations, and knowledge-acquisition are briefly presented. We relate them to research pertaining to narrative structures and provide a mathematical description for aesthetic emotions. We conclude by underlining the fundamental role played by aesthetic emotions in the workings of the human mind.