AI Boils Down Stories into Six Emotional Arcs, But It Can't Tell Me How to Feel About That

In a recent scientific study highlighted by The Atlantic, researchers from the University of Vermont and the University of Adelaide determined the core emotional trajectories of stories by taking advantage of advances in computing power and natural language processing to analyze the emotional arcs of 1,737 fictional works in English available in the online library Project Gutenberg. Their research, published online, involved assigning happiness scores to 10,000 frequently used words determined by a crowdsourcing project, then breaking up blocks of text to analyze the happiness of each block and mapping those scores on an emotional trajectory. The researchers recognize that emotional arcs and plot structures may be similar, but are not necessarily the same. They also point out multiple well-known theories that all narratives can be boiled down three plots, seven plots, a different seven plots, 20 plots, or even 36 plots depending on who you read and believe. Furthermore, the researchers realize that multiple, connected emotional arcs appear in longer, more complex works of fiction, so they limited their study sample to works of fiction between 10,000 words and 200,000 words.