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Surprise as Emotion: Between Startle and Humility: In Cooperation with The Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology

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Abstract

I consider the experience of surprise within the context of my current work on the emotions. To do this, I examine surprise in terms of its belief structure, distinguishing it from a startle (1). I then suggest that surprise is a being caught off-guard that is related to being attentively turned toward something (2). As the latter, I qualify surprise as an emotion in its being thrown back on an experience in a way that is different from affectively turning toward something (3). This constitutes surprise as a disequilibrium in distinction to a diremptive experience like we find in the moral emotions of shame or guilt (4). Finally, I distinguish surprise from a gift, which is peculiar to the experience of humility. I then suggest that surprise is an emotion while being neither an affect, like a startle-reflex, nor a moral emotion, like shame, guilt, or humility.

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... Surprise refers to a feeling of sharp, sudden, and unexpected expansion of the possibility space (see ▶ "the Adjacent Possible", this volume). Importantly, this expansion is one which results in an updating of the current knowledge state rather than a rejection of the intrusion (Steinbock 2018). Expressing surprise is not the same as expressing skepticism; we are surprised by something which is evidentially true but which we have not considered before. ...
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Full-text available
... Surprise refers to a feeling of sharp, sudden, and unexpected expansion of the possibility space (see ▶ "the Adjacent Possible", this volume). Importantly, this expansion is one which results in an updating of the current knowledge state rather than a rejection of the intrusion (Steinbock 2018). Expressing surprise is not the same as expressing skepticism; we are surprised by something which is evidentially true but which we have not considered before. ...
Chapter
An unexpected or inexplicable event with significance to the self that is accompanied by a strong emotional marker (which can be positive , negative, or mixed in valence). Keywords Surprise · Insight · Serendipity · Error Surprise and the Possibility Space Possibility refers to that which is not actual. It invites us to consider "what could be," "what is to come," "what could have been," and "what is not / will never be." In interaction with the world (sometimes only our internal world), possibilities can lead us to "what was unexpected." These unexpected events, when they are of subjective significance, are marked by the epistemic emotion of surprise. We can all recognize the feeling of surprise, typically when we encounter something unexpected but which we instinctively believe even if we are curious about its origins. Take for example, the serendipitous surprise of bumping into a dear friend in a country that you did not expect them to be in. A further surprising event, to take a more thoroughly researched example, might be scientists receiving reports of unexpected side effects of drugs which indicate new unanticipated ways that the drug works on the body (Rocca et al. 2019). These reports are not expected, but they trigger curiosity and exploration. Surprise can be not only a marker of this expected violation, but also a marker of unexpected understanding (insight). In the case of the latter, surprise marks both the recognition of prior ignorance and the discovery of new knowledge. Beyond these broad phenomena such as seren-dipity, insight, and creativity, surprise underpins and explains aspects of human cognition across several different levels and, we will argue, is fundamental to understanding how we interact with the unpredictable and unexpected nature of the possible (Glǎveanu 2021). We go further to suggest that increased attention to the role of surprise in thinking and behavior can support our understanding of how cognition unfolds in the face of uncertainty, allowing us to flesh out and adjudi-cate between different models at different cogni-tive levels. In this respect, it is "surprising" that this complex phenomenon has often been relegated to a minor role (Nevo and Erev 2012). We shall end by considering the importance of surprise to the complex interactional process of ser-endipity and suggest that the importance of
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