Reading Emotions

Here are the insights we have gained from your support to date.

Fiction and Emotions: What We Learned

Stories don’t just entertain, they let us imagine and feel emotions in a safe, simulated way. But until now, we haven’t had a clear, large-scale picture of the emotions that fiction actually contains.

Over 3,500 volunteers came together to label the emotions that characters were feeling in more than 40,000 passages from stories, both fictional and non-fictional. In total, you contributed over 200,000 emotion descriptions! We then used computational methods to translate these labels into three standard “emotion dimensions”: Valence (how positive or negative), Arousal (how intense or calm), and Dominance (how in control or powerless).

The results surprised us. Many theories say fiction is all about strong, intense feelings. But we found something different. Across cultures, genres, and time periods, fiction consistently leans toward negative emotions and, especially, emotions where characters feel low control, like vulnerability, uncertainty, and powerlessness. And this pattern has grown stronger over the past 100 years, for both male and female characters.

Today, the emotions that stand out most in fiction aren’t just negative, they’re also low-control: loneliness, fear, sadness, confusion. This raises new questions about why stories so often focus on characters who feel powerless, and what role these emotions might play in the way fiction works.

Publications

We currently have two articles under review, one that shares the underlying data and the other that shares the insights we gained from your contributions.

Will keep you posted as we learn more!