Surprise, an instinctive emotion, is a reaction to an unexpected event or sound or a deviation from your norm. It can be pleasant or unpleasant and range in intensity.
Of the seven instinctive emotions, surprise is the shortest feeling. For a fleeting moment, you experience something that your mind does not expect, that is not in your memory, mental filing system or what scientists call your ‘schema’.
In surprise, positive or negative, your mind freezes for a fleeting moment. It is a hard wired subconscious information processing system in your brain. Surprise intensifies your subsequent emotions, which could be joy as your mind acknowledges a pleasant experience or fear as you feel startled by something negative.
Back in 350 BC, Aristotle, a Greek philosopher, recorded the feeling of surprise. Confucius, an ancient Chinese philosopher, born in 551BC, included surprise as one of the seven universal emotions in his book of Rites. Darwin discussed surprise in terms of biological function, a theory further developed by evolutionary emotion theorists Silvan Tomkins and Carroll Izard. It is thought that the purpose of surprise is to focus attention, both in mind and body, in order to assess the situation.
Surprise works at an unconscious level in your mind
Surprise is an instinctive emotion, a hard wired information processing function that works at an unconscious level in your brain where the bilateral inferior frontal gyrus and bilateral hippocampus are activated. Your subconscious freezes your thinking process before updating what you have encountered with your belief systems you have stored in your memory and soul. You expect something to happen but you experience something different.
Your thoughts might be frozen at 200 milliseconds in surprise
Both common sense thinking and empirical surprise research indicate that your thoughts are interrupted by the element of surprise. Scientists are not in agreement as to how long this fleeting interruption in thoughts is and at what point your attention shifts to the surprising situation to evaluate it. In a 2019 review of the cognitive-evolutionary theory by Reisenzein et al, published in Cognitive Science, the Horstmann (2006) studies are cited, in which subjects were fast tapping at about eight key presses per second and a surprise caused interruption at 200ms.
Surprise is a fleeting sense triggered by something unexpected. An alarm bell that motivates us to assess the situation.
Of the seven instinctive emotions, surprise is the shortest feeling. For a fleeting moment, you experience something that you do not remember or expect. In the case of an unexpected sensory experience, like a sound, you feel startled, your body reacts.
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