Surprise

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

Conversations of Spirituality: Spirituality in Family Systems Nursing—Making the Case with Four Clinical Vignettes

Abstract: Nursing has a history of acknowledging the spiritual as a taken-for-granted dimension in health and illness. However, nurses and other health professionals have struggled to find meaningful ways to attend to the spiritual in practice. This article explores the notion that to inquire about spirituality is not neutral and not inquiring is also not neutral. In addition, four clinical vignettes are presented that illustrate ways of opening space to the spiritual in family systems nursing, within the framework of the Illness Beliefs Model. These include opening space for the following: the gift of listening, curiosity and surprise, inviting reflections, and the invocation of metaphor. This article also addresses how some constraining beliefs of the clinician can actually inhibit or close the door to possible exploration of spiritual experience.

Creating suspense and surprise in short literary fiction: a stylistic and narratological approach

Abstract: Suspense and surprise, as common and crucial elements of interest realised in literary fiction, are analysed closely in a sample of short stories, so as to develop a detailed explanation of how these forms of interest are created in literary texts, and to propose models for them. Creating suspense involves more conditions, necessary and optional, and more complication than surprise: the several optional conditions mainly serve to intensify the feeling of suspense the reader experiences. Surprise requires two necessary and sufficient conditions, with only a couple of optional conditions to maintain or ensure coherence in the text. The differences are considered attributable to a more fundamental difference between suspense and surprise as emotions. Suspense can be regarded as a progressive emotion, whereas surprise is a perfective emotion. As such, suspense as an interest is considered as a process-oriented interest, while surprise is an effect-oriented one. Suspense is mostly experienced while reading and has the reader involved with the story. Surprise drives the reader to reassess the story in the new light it throws on events and to look for some further message; this is often a main aim of the literary fiction which ends in surprise.

An inquiry into the factors that impact on consumer appreciation of a board game

Abstract: Purpose – Board games such as Monopoly and Scrabble enjoy a great deal of popularity among players of all ages. The objective of this study was to identify the characteristics of board games that impact significantly on players' appreciation.Design/methodology/ approach – A review of the literature and a qualitative study with players and board game professionals resulted in the identification of seven explanatory factors. A survey was conducted among 169 adult players selected using an area sampling method.Findings – The survey results revealed that the most important factor in explaining players' appreciation of a board game was the extent to which the game was able to make them fantasize and live uncommon experiences. The second factor in importance was the entertainment that is associated with playing a game. Some unexpected differences were found between male and female players. Whereas the surprise elements of a game had a positive impact on men's appreciation, they were not significant among women....

Decomposing neural responses to melodic surprise in musicians and non-musicians: evidence for a hierarchy of predictions in the auditory system

Abstract: Neural responses to auditory surprise are typically studied with highly unexpected, disruptive sounds. Consequently, little is known about auditory prediction in everyday contexts that are characterized by fine-grained, non-disruptive fluctuations of auditory surprise. To address this issue, we used IDyOM, a computational model of auditory expectation, to obtain continuous surprise estimates for a set of newly composed melodies. Our main goal was to assess whether the neural correlates of non-disruptive surprising sounds in a musical context are affected by musical expertise. Using magnetoencephalography (MEG), auditory responses were recorded from musicians and non-musicians while they listened to the melodies. Consistent with a previous study, the amplitude of the N1m component increased with higher levels of computationally estimated surprise. This effect, however, was not different between the two groups. Further analyses offered an explanation for this finding: Pitch interval size itself, rather than probabilistic prediction, was responsible for the modulation of the N1m, thus pointing to low-level sensory adaptation as the underlying mechanism. In turn, the formation of auditory regularities and proper probabilistic prediction were reflected in later components: the mismatch negativity (MMNm) and the P3am, respectively. Overall, our findings reveal a hierarchy of expectations in the auditory system and highlight the need to properly account for sensory adaptation in research addressing statistical learning. Highlights - In melodies, sound expectedness (modeled with IDyOM) is associated with the amplitude of the N1m. - This effect is not different between musicians and non-musicians. - Sensory adaptation related to melodic pitch intervals explains better the N1m effect. - Auditory regularities and the expectations captured by IDyOM are reflected in the MMNm and P3am. - Evidence for a hierarchy of auditory predictions during melodic listening.