The emotional arcs of stories are dominated by six basic shapes

Understand

Advances in computing power, natural language processing, and digitization of text now make it possible to study a culture's evolution through its texts using a "big data" lens.

• Our ability to communicate relies in part upon a shared emotional experience, with stories often following distinct emotional trajectories and forming patterns that are meaningful to us.
• Here, by classifying the emotional arcs for a filtered subset of 1,327 stories from Project Gutenberg's fiction collection, we find a set of six core emotional arcs which form the essential building blocks of complex emotional trajectories.
• We strengthen our findings by separately applying Matrix decomposition, supervised learning, and unsupervised learning.