Original title: The emotional arcs of stories are dominated by six basic shapes
The researchers track how emotions change across stories in a filtered set of fiction from Project Gutenberg. They find six basic emotional shapes that can combine into more complex emotional journeys. They check this result with three different kinds of analysis. They also find that stories matching some shapes get more downloads than others.
Imagine sorting a pile of songs by how their mood changes from beginning to end. Some start low and rise, while others rise and then fall. In this paper, the changing moods of stories are sorted into six basic shapes that can form more complicated emotional journeys.
Stories help people share emotional experiences, and their emotional movement may follow a smaller set of patterns than their plots suggest. Knowing which arcs are associated with more downloads could help researchers study how story shape relates to reader interest, though downloads are only one measure of success.
The abstract describes a filtered subset of 1,327 stories from Project Gutenberg, not all stories or all cultures. It reports an association between certain emotional arcs and greater downloads, but does not establish that an arc causes a story to succeed or explain what drives downloads.
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The emotional arcs of stories are dominated by six basic shapes — Andrew J Reagan, Lewis Mitchell, Dilan Kiley et al. — EPJ Data Science — doi:10.1140/epjds/s13688-016-0093-1
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.