The words that trigger suspense

Even if you already know what is going to happen, your pulse will race and your palms sweat when you read a thrilling novel. But why do we experience such an intense emotion when reading a book? That’s the question a team of English grad students and Mark Algee-Hewitt, an assistant professor at Stanford University, are trying to answer.

“The big goal of the research is to try and explain why we feel suspense when confronted with certain aesthetic objects, even if we know the outcome of them,” Algee-Hewitt says.

In fact, the continued experience of suspense for readers even when they know what happens in the plot has been a central question for this type of literary study, he adds.

Although the project is still ongoing, the group’s central finding so far is that suspense is characterised by the presence of words that convey how things appear to be rather than how they really are, such as “seemed,” “perceived,” or “observed.”

“Suspense texts appear to be able to create a virtual space in which the reader can experience uncertainty without necessarily having this kind of ontological uncertainty about the text, or forgetting the ontological certainty of the text that he or she already knows,” he says.

Studying suspense with digital humanities methodologies posed a problem from the beginning because suspense is so dependent on the reader’s emotional experience, Algee-Hewitt says.

“It’s an exciting way not to jettison concepts like taste or suspense or attachment in the name of objectivity, but instead to take them as an object of study that you can track and quantify,” says Hannah Walser, an English doctoral candidate.

Agree on suspense
“We discovered that we agree in general on what is suspenseful and what isn’t, at least in terms of the ups and downs of the narrative,” says Andrew Shephard, an English doctoral candidate.