Box 1.

The paradox of suspense

There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.—Alfred Hitchcock One big influence on a person’s response to a mediated message is their previous exposure to that message or similar messages. Knowing the endings to movies like The Sixth Sense and Saw will fundamentally alter how someone comprehends story information on a second viewing because there is new context. However, viewers have long reported that they will still feel suspense when watching a suspenseful film a second time (Carroll, 1996; Gerrig, 1989). This is referred to as the paradox of suspense, or the idea that repeat viewers feel the same emotion despite knowing a story’s outcomes. The paradox of suspense has been contemplated across disciplines from literary studies to quantitative communication research for many decades. The paradox can be summarized in three premises (Yanal, 1996): Suspense requires uncertainty. If one consumes a narrative a second time, that person is certain of the outcomes. People feel suspense when they consume a narrative a subsequent time. Given that these three premises cannot logically all be true, scholars have weighed in on whether they believe the first premise to be wrong (Comisky and Bryant, 1982; de Wied et al., 1997; Zillmann, 1996), the second (Brewer and Lichtenstein, 1982; Gerrig, 1989) or the third (Uidhir, 2011; Yanal, 1996). Despite being a relatively untouched topic in recent years, audiences still go back to experience their favorite media again and again. Modern methodological and analytical tools are poised to shed new light on this phenomenon, such as by determining how intraindividual patterns of brain activity evolve from one viewing to the next.