Author(s)

Felix Schoeller¹, Leonid Perlovsky^2*

¹Department of Media, Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark.
²Department of Psychology, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA.

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.

Emotions, Aesthetic Chills, Expectations, Knowledge, Narratives, Meaning

Schoeller, F. and Perlovsky, L. (2015) Great Expectations—Narratives and the Elicitation of Aesthetic Chills. Psychology, 6, 2098-2102. doi: 10.4236/psych.2015.616205.