Information for the scientific community
According to standard definitions suspense is a complex emotional-cognitive state involving fear, hope and uncertainty that humans experience in response to some external state of affairs, usually some sequence of events. We are interested in a particular type of suspense that arises as a reaction to attending to the plot of a written narrative by means of reading or listening.
Questions and Suspense
We hypothesize that the experience of suspense is a direct result of the questions the reader forms in her mind when reading a text. While the text and individual characteristics of the reader jointly probabilistically impact the erotetic structure which an individual may construct as part of her interpretation of the text, the erotetic structure itself reflects the suspenseful nature of the text in a deterministic way. Put differently, whether a reader does or does not experience a text as suspenseful depends on the questions she asks during her reading experience. These in turn depend on both the text itself and on individual properties of the reader and her reading experience.
Operational goals of the project
G1 Provide a comprehensive theory of text interpretation that is fine-grained enough to explicate suspense as a feature of text interpretation.
G2 Empirically investigate to what extent a rich representation of text interpretation maps to the emergence of suspense.Â
G3 Isolate and theoretically model the textual factors that probabilistically influence the emergence of interpretations that determine narrative suspense.