FIGURE 1.

Average ratings of tension and suspense (standard scores with SE) experienced over the course of (A) a music piece (Mendelssohn’s Venetian Boat Song) and (B) a literary text (E. T. A. Hoffmann, The Sandman). For the music piece, tension ratings were acquired using a virtual slider shown on a computer screen that participants continuously adjusted depending on their subjective experience of tension; for the literary text, suspense ratings were acquired at 65 time points during reading of the text.