ABSTRACT
To understand the structure and function of stories, we need to understand emotion. Stories are fundamentally particular causal sequences. But the part of causal sequences that constitutes a prototypical story is determined by the sensitivities and organization of our emotion systems. For instance, our sense of what constitutes an event in a story is in part a function of the processes involved in the development and experience of an emotion episode. Literary stories (as opposed to, say, an engineer’s account of how a radiator cracked) are characterized by their stress on agents pursuing (emotion-defined) goals, as well as their manipulation of the reader’s interpersonal stance toward those agents (roughly, empathic, antipathetic, or ambivalent; literary stories also take up the reader’s other emotional responses, such as interest). Cross-culturally recurring story genres (romantic, heroic, sacrificial, and so forth) are generated from the protagonists’ goals, which are defined, in their general properties, by human emotion systems. Recurring features of story development result from ordinary psychological processes that intensify the emotions elicited by the outcome of the story (e.g., joy at the reunion of lovers).
