The emotional arcs of stories are dominated by six basic shapes
By Andrew J. Reagan, Lewis Mitchell, Dilan Kiley, Christopher M. Danforth, Peter Sheridan Dodds. EPJ Data Science, 2016
448 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Advances in computing power, natural language processing, and digitization of text now make it possible to study a culture’s evolution through its texts using a ‘big data’ lens. Our ability to communicate relies in part upon a shared emotional experience, with stories often following distinct emotional trajectories and forming patterns that are meaningful to us. Here, by classifying the emotional arcs for a filtered subset of 1,327 stories from Project Gutenberg’s fiction collection, we find a set of six core emotional arcs which form the essential building blocks of complex emotional trajectories. We strengthen our findings by separately applying matrix decomposition, supervised learning, and unsupervised learning. For each of these six core emotional arcs, we examine the closest characteristic stories in publication today and find that particular emotional arcs enjoy greater success, as measured by downloads.
Subfields: Cultural Studies, General Social Sciences, Social Psychology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f70eafb452554f1bedf2c0725b0d4299b3c53d34
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Citations in the corpus
- Identifying the sentiment styles of YouTube’s vloggers (2018, background): “…stories, termed the ‘rags to riches’ (i.e., a rise in sentiment), ‘tragedy’ or ‘riches to rags’ (i.e., a fall in sentiment), ‘man in hole’ (i.e., fall-rise), ‘Icarus’ (i.e., rise-fall), ‘Cinderella’ (i.e., rise-fall-rise), and ‘Oedipus’ styles (i.e., fall-rise-fall; see Reagan et al., 2016).”
- Shaping the Narrative Arc: An Information-Theoretic Approach to Collaborative Dialogue (2019, methodology): “Using a probabilistic classifier for narrative tracking has been explored previously (Mohammad, 2011; Reagan et al., 2016).”
- Narrative Fingerprints: Multi-Scale Author Identification via Novelty Curve Dynamics (2026, unknown): “Reagan et al. (2016) formalized this with their “six emotional arcs” typology, demonstrating that narrative shape can be clustered into a small number of archetypal patterns.”