Hope and fear in the experience of suspense

ABSTRACT

The topic of mixed emotions has received considerable attention in recent years. However, two limitations in this research are the lack of (a) theoretical prediction regarding the types of conditions likely to cause one emotion to yield to another, and (b) attention given to the moment-to-moment (MTM) experience of mixed emotions. Using the empirical context of competitive contests, the mixed emotions state of suspense was manipulated in a series of studies designed to address these shortcomings. The results indicate that the most appropriate emotion pair to describe suspense is hope and fear. In addition, we find that the juxtaposition of these two emotions over the temporal sequence relies on viewers’ interpretation of observed events relative to a preferred outcome. The results indicate a prevalence of bipolarity between hope and fear at lower levels of suspense and bivariance at higher levels. Given a high-suspense episode, both hope and fear are activated; whereas when suspense is low, hope (fear) is ascendant and fear (hope) declines when it becomes obvious a preferred competitor will ultimately win (lose).

KEYWORDS:

• moment-to-moment data
• mixed emotions
• suspense
• hope and fear

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data from these studies is publicly available at https://osf.io/k6ywx/

Notes

1 The assumption of co-occurrence or mutual exclusivity also has scaling implications (Schimmack, 2005). Mutual exclusivity suggests the use of a bipolar scale with a neutral midpoint in which the two contrasting emotions lie along a single dimension. By contrast, co-occurrence is measured using unipolar scales in which the intensity of each emotion is measured from “no feeling at all” to “extreme feeling” with a midpoint indicating moderate intensity.

2 The significant role of outcome in the three-way interactions found for the Blowout pattern in our earlier analyses, which were conducted at the level of the individual, were not expected when the race was used as the unit of analysis. This is because MIN_Hope-Fear considers the co-occurrence of hope and fear over time rather than directly comparing the two emotions on the basis of aggregate measures as was done when the analysis was conducted at the level of the individual. Accordingly, race outcome was not included in the current analysis.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.