Surprise

About: Surprise is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 4371 publications have been published within this topic receiving 99386 citations.

Anticipation and the surprises of everyday life

Abstract: Anticipation calls into question the status of the future with respect to the past, which has become particularly problematic and complex in the “risk society”, where risk is now omnipresent, notably in everyday life: for example, the areas of food, health and urban security and safety. The author takes the recently launched idea of interstices of everyday life (IEL), which alludes to “in-between” situations as well as to experiences that are apparently overlooked but which have a bearing on emerging values and revive the center/periphery relationship: for example, waiting/expectation, breaks, silence, games, gifts. In this context, surprise is seen as an interstitial phenomenon: looking at the notion from the standpoint of the unpleasant or bad surprises of everyday life leads the author to examine the place assigned to it in the planning of activities in today’s time-oriented cultures. On this basis, the author advances some observations on certain trends and deadlocks of our social systems. One major e...

Presenting the VENEC corpus : Development of a cross-cultural corpus of vocal emotion expressions and a novel method of annotating emotion appraisals

Abstract: We introduce the Vocal Expressions of Nineteen Emotions across Cultures (VENEC) corpus and present results from initial evaluation efforts using a novel method of annotating emotion appraisals. The VENEC corpus consists of 100 professional actors from 5 English speaking cultures (USA, India, Kenya, Singapore, and Australia) who vocally expressed 19 different affects/emotions (affection, amusement, anger, contempt, disgust, distress, fear, guilt, happiness, interest, lust, negative surprise, neutral, positive surprise, pride, relief, sadness, serenity, and shame), each with 3 levels of emotion intensity, by enacting finding themselves in various emotion-eliciting situations. In all, the corpus contains approximately 6,500 stimuli offering great variety of expressive styles for each emotion category due to speaker, culture, and emotion intensity effects. All stimuli have further been acoustically analyzed regarding pitch, intensity, voice quality, and durational cues. In the appraisal rating study, listeners rated a selection of VENEC-stimuli with regard to the characteristics of the emotion eliciting situation, described in terms of 8 emotion appraisal dimensions (novelty, intrinsic pleasantness, goal conduciveness, urgency, power, self- and other-responsibility, and norm compatibility). First, results showed that the inter-rater reliability was acceptable for all scales except responsibility. Second, the perceived appraisal profiles for the different vocal expressions were generally in accord with predictions based on appraisal theory. Finally, listeners’ appraisal ratings on each scale were significantly correlated with several acoustic characteristics. The results show that listeners can reliably infer several aspects of emotion-eliciting situations from vocal affect expressions, and thus suggest that vocal affect expressions may carry cognitive representational information.

Extending a contrast resolution model of humor in television advertising: the role of surprise

Abstract: Few studies have tested models incorporating cognitive äs well äs affective mechanisms that help explain different levels of perceived humorousness in advertising (cf. Alden and Hoyer 1993; Speck 1991). In this study, we extend the current literature by hypothesizing relationships between several message characteristics, perceived humor andattitude towards the ad. In an empirical test ofan extended contrast-resolution model, surprise isfound to be related to substantial amounts of variance in the perception of humor. Surprise is also found to mediale the effects of other antecedent variables such äs type of contrast, strength of contrast andextent ofimagery evoked by the ad. These findings suggest that surprise is a central driving force determining the humorousness ofan adver tisement. The implications ofthe proposed extension of the contrast-resolution model for humor in television advertising are discussed from both theoretic andappliedperspectives, and directions for future research are suggested.

Double Surprise into Higher Future Returns

Abstract: Post-earnings-announcement drift is the well-documented ability of earnings surprises to predict future stock returns. Despite nearly four decades of research, little has been written about the importance of how earnings surprise is actually measured. We compare the magnitude of the drift when historical time-series data are used to estimate earnings surprise with the magnitude when analyst forecasts are used. We show that the drift is significantly larger when analyst forecasts are used. Furthermore, we show that using the two models together does a better job of predicting future stock returns than using either model alone.

Another Look at Looking Time: Surprise as Rational Statistical Inference.

Abstract: Decades of developmental research have capitalized on the fact that infants are surprised (i.e., look longer) at some events but not others. Differences in looking time have been considered to be a reflection of perceptual discrimination, or a reaction toward witnessing a violation of prior expectations. Here, we provide an overview of a new perspective on infant surprise that examines the underlying cognitive processes that drive this response. We suggest that looking time may reflect sophisticated statistical inference, and we review empirical evidence and computational modeling results from several recent studies to support this conjecture (Kidd, Piantadosi, & Aslin, ; Piantadosi, Kidd, & Aslin, ; Sim, Griffiths, & Xu, ; Sim & Xu, ; Teglas et al., ). We also discuss how our view relates to other new developmental research on surprise and learning (Stahl & Feigenson, , ) and outline some suggestions for future research.