If you're ever reading a book or watching a movie and get the distinct feeling you've come across the story before – or even better, can predict exactly what's going to happen next –there could be a good reason for that.
Computer scientists have sifted through the language of more than 1,700 works of fiction and discovered that English literature c**ists of just six kinds of emotional arcs that make up nearly all of the most well-known stories.
While literary theorists have for centuries characterised and counted the basic plots and structures that writers use in stories, it's unlikely there's ever been such a rigorous scientific analysis of English fiction like this before.
Researchers from the Computational Story Laboratory at the University of Vermont mined the complete text of some 1,737 fiction works available on Project Gutenberg, an online collection of more than 50,000 digital books in the public domain. By analysing the sentiment of language used in chunks of text 10,000 words long in each of these texts, the researchers were able to register the emotional ups and downs for the stories as a whole. Negative words like "poverty", "dead", and "punishment" dragged the sentiment down, while positive terms like "love", "peace", and "friend" brought it up.
Doing this for over 1,700 books and charting the dynamics of each text, the team discovered that all stories basically boil down to one of a set number of emotional patterns. "We find a set of six coretrajectories which form the building blocks of complex narratives," the authors write in their study.
According to the researchers, those six core emotional arcs are:
根据研究人员的说法,这6种核心情感弧线包括:
"Rags to riches" (An ongoing emotional rise, eg. Alice's Adventures Under Ground)
“白手起家型”(持续的情感上涨,如《爱丽丝地下奇遇记》)
"Tragedy, or riches to rags" (An ongoing emotional fall, eg. Romeo and Juliet)
“悲剧型”或者“家道中落型”(持续的情感下落,如《罗密欧与朱丽叶》)
"Man in a hole" (A fall followed by a rise)
“穴人型”(先下落后上涨)
"Icarus" (A rise followed by a fall)
“伊卡洛斯型”(先上涨后下落)
"Cinderella" (Rise–fall–rise)
“灰姑娘型”(上涨-下落-上涨)
"Oedipus" (Fall–rise–fall)
“俄狄浦斯型”(下落-上涨-下落)
Interestingly, based on download statistics from Project Gutenberg, the researchers say the most popular stories are ones that use more complex emotional arcs, with the Cinderella and Oedipus arcs registering the most downloads. Also popular are works that combine these core arcs together in new ways within one story, such as two sequential "Man in a hole" arcs stuck together, or the "Cinderella" arc coupled with a tragic ending.