Raphaël Baroni, La tension narrative. Suspense, curiosité, surprise, Paris, Seuil, 2007

Suspense and Surprise

We model demand for non-instrumental information, drawing on the idea that people derive entertainment utility from suspense and surprise. A period has more suspense if the variance of the next period’s beliefs is greater. A period has more surprise if the current belief is further from the last period’s belief. Under these definitions, we analyze the optimal way to reveal information over time...

Suspense and Surprise: Online Appendix

Here we describe how the plots in Figure 3 are generated. There are six applications of the suspense and surprise models: tennis, soccer, blackjack, Clinton-Obama primary, optimal surprise, and optimal suspense. For each application, the second column depicts a scatterplot of surprise and suspense values for each observation, where u(x) = √ x and absolute surprise and suspense values are divide...

Book Review:Ricoeur Paul, La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, (L’ordre philosophique), Paris: Seuil, 2003

A model of suspense for narrative generation

Most work on automatic generation of narratives, and more specifically suspenseful narrative, has focused on detailed domain-specific modelling of character psychology and plot structure. Recent work on the automatic learning of narrative schemas suggests an alternative approach that exploits such schemas for modelling and measuring suspense. We propose a domain-independent model for tracking s...

Narrative Generation for Suspense: Modeling and Evaluation

Although suspense contributes significantly to the enjoyment of a narrative by its readers, there has been little research on the automated generation of stories that evoke specific cognitive and affective responses in their readers. The goal of this research is to develop and evaluate a system that produces a narrative designed specifically to evoke suspense from the reader. The system takes a...