We introduce Dramatis, a computational model of suspense based on a reformulation of a psychological definition of the suspense phenomenon. In this reformulation, suspense is correlated with the audience’s ability to generate a plan for the protagonist to avoid an impending negative outcome. Dramatis measures the suspense level by generating such a plan and determining its perceived likelih...

We tested the hypothesis that, during naturalistic viewing, moments of increasing narrative suspense narrow the scope of attentional focus. We also tested how changes in the emotional congruency of the music would affect brain responses to suspense, as well as subsequent memory for narrative events. In our study, participants viewed suspenseful film excerpts while brain activation was measured ...

Tension and suspense are powerful emotional experiences that occur in a wide variety of contexts (e.g., in music, film, literature, and everyday life). The omnipresence of tension and suspense suggests that they build on very basic cognitive and affective mechanisms. However, the psychological underpinnings of tension experiences remain largely unexplained, and tension and suspense are rarely d...

We propose a computational framework for the recognition of suspense and dramatic arc in stories. Suspense is an affective response to narrative structure that accompanies the reduction in quantity or quality of plans available to a protagonist faced with potential goal failure and/or harm. Our work is motivated by the recognition that computational systems are historically unable to reliably r...

Stories can elicit powerful emotions. A key emotional response to narrative plots (e.g., novels, movies, etc.) is suspense. Suspense appears to build on basic aspects of human cognition such as processes of expectation, anticipation, and prediction. However, the neural processes underlying emotional experiences of suspense have not been previously investigated. We acquired functional magnetic r...

hariri’s maqamat is one of arabic cultural and literary works in the field of social aspects of life and linguistic characteristics and language games, as well as on narrative aspects of fictions. avoidance from pure verbal and historical topics and from mere attention to rhetorical techniques in this work, on one hand, and the tendency to survey and follow the narration on the other hand can p...

The IRIS story generation system is a narrative planner that is designed to create suspenseful stories at the story-action level. It uses a set of action templates that are injected into the planning process to create suspense around a given goal. The action templates were evaluated independent of the rest of the IRIS system against a series of other techniques designed to create suspense. Resu...

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...

BACKGROUND Quorum sensing (QS) plays an important role in the production of virulence factors and pathogenicity in Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and the interruption of QS will be a hopeful pathway to combat bacterial infection. OBJECTIVE In this study, we selected Forsythia suspense (Thunb.) Vahl from traditional Chinese herbal medicines for its anti-QS activity. MATERIALS AND METHODS Anti-QS of...

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...