Reagan et al.

EPJ Data Science ( 2016) 5:31

DOI 10.1140/epjds/s13688-016-0093-1

REGULAR ARTICLE Open Access

The emotional arcs of stories are

dominated by six basic shapes
Andrew J Reagan1* , Lewis Mitchell2 , Dilan Kiley1 , Christopher M Danforth1 and Peter Sheridan Dodds1
*
Correspondence:
andrew.reagan@uvm.edu Abstract
1
University of Vermont, 85 South
Prospect St, Burlington, VT 05405, Advances in computing power, natural language processing, and digitization of text
USA now make it possible to study a culture’s evolution through its texts using a ‘big data’
Full list of author information is lens. Our ability to communicate relies in part upon a shared emotional experience,
available at the end of the article
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. For each of these six core emotional
arcs, we examine the closest characteristic stories in publication today and find that
particular emotional arcs enjoy greater success, as measured by downloads.
Keywords: stories; sentiment mining; narratology; language; society

1 Introduction
The power of stories to transfer information and define our own existence has been shown
time and again [–]. We are fundamentally driven to find and tell stories, likened to Pan
Narrans or Homo Narrativus. Stories are encoded in art, language, and even in the math-
ematics of physics: We use equations to represent both simple and complicated functions
that describe our observations of the real world. In science, we formalize the ideas that
best fit our experience with principles such as Occam’s Razor: The simplest story is the
one we should trust. We tend to prefer stories that fit into the molds which are familiar,
and reject narratives that do not align with our experience [].
We seek to better understand stories that are captured and shared in written form, a
medium that since inception has radically changed how information flows []. Without
evolved cues from tone, facial expression, or body language, written stories are forced to
capture the entire transfer of experience on a page. An often integral part of a written story
is the emotional experience that is evoked in the reader. Here, we use a simple, robust sen-
timent analysis tool to extract the reader-perceived emotional content of written stories
as they unfold on the page.
We objectively test aspects of the theories of folkloristics [, ], specifically the common-
ality of core stories within societal boundaries [, ]. A major component of folkloristics
is the study of society and culture through literary analysis. This is sometimes referred
to as narratology, which at its core is ‘a series of events, real or fictional, presented to the

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Reagan et al. EPJ Data Science ( 2016) 5:31 Page 2 of 12

reader or the listener’ []. In our present treatment, we consider the plot as the ‘back-
bone’ of events that occur in a chronological sequence (more detail on previous theories
of plot are in Appendix A in Additional file ). While the plot captures the mechanics of
a narrative and the structure encodes their delivery, in the present work we examine the
emotional arc that is invoked through the words used. The emotional arc of a story does
not give us direct information about the plot or the intended meaning of the story, but
rather exists as part of the whole narrative (e.g., an emotional arc showing a fall in senti-
ment throughout a story may arise from very different plot and structure combinations).
This distinction between the emotional arc and the plot of a story is one point of misunder-
standing in other work that has drawn criticism from the digital humanities community
[]. Through the identification of motifs [], narrative theories [] allow us to analyze,
interpret, describe, and compare stories across cultures and regions of the world []. We
show that automated extraction of emotional arcs is not only possibly, but can test previ-
ous theories and provide new insights with the potential to quantify unobserved trends as
the field transitions from data-scarce to data-rich [, ].
The rejected master’s thesis of Kurt Vonnegut - which he personally considered his
greatest contribution - defines the emotional arc of a story on the ‘Beginning-End’ and ‘Ill
Fortune-Great Fortune’ axes []. Vonnegut finds a remarkable similarity between Cin-
derella and the origin story of Christianity in the Old Testament (see Figure S in Ap-
pendix B in Additional file ), leading us to search for all such groupings. In a recorded
lecture available on YouTube [], Vonnegut asserted:

‘There is no reason why the simple shapes of stories can’t be fed into computers, they
are beautiful shapes.’

For our analysis, we apply three independent tools: matrix decomposition by singular
value decomposition (SVD), supervised learning by agglomerative (hierarchical) cluster-
ing with Ward’s method, and unsupervised learning by a self-organizing map (SOM, a
type of neural network). Each tool encompasses different strengths: the SVD finds the
underlying basis of all of the emotional arcs, the clustering classifies the emotional arcs
into distinct groups, and the SOM generates arcs from noise which are similar to those in
our corpus using a stochastic process. It is only by considering the results of each tool in
support of each other that we are able to confirm our findings.
We proceed as follows. We first introduce our methods in Section , we then discuss
the combined results of each method in Section , and we present our conclusions in
Section . A graphical outline of the methodology and results can be found as Figure S
in Appendix B in Additional file .

2 Methods
2.1 Emotional arc construction
To generate emotional arcs, we analyze the sentiment of , word windows, which we
slide through the text (see Figure ). We rate the emotional content of each window us-
ing our Hedonometer with the labMT dataset, chosen for lexical coverage and its ability to
generate meaningful word shift graphs, specifically using , words as a minimum nec-
essary to generate meaningful sentiment scores [, ]. We emphasize that dictionary-
based methods for sentiment analysis usually perform worse than random on individual
sentences [, ], and although this issue can be resolved by using a rolling average of
Reagan et al. EPJ Data Science ( 2016) 5:31 Page 3 of 12

Figure 1 Schematic of how we compute

emotional arcs. The indicated uniform length
segments (gap between samples) taken from the
text form the sample with fixed window size set at
Nw = 10,000 words. The segment length is thus
Ns = (N – (Nw + 1))/n for N the length of the book in
words, and n the number of points in the time
series. Sliding this fixed size window through the
book, we generate n sentiment scores with the
Hedonometer, which comprise the emotional
arc [22].

Figure 2 Annotated emotional arc of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by JK Rowling, inspired by
the illustration made by Medaris for The Why Files [23]. The entire seven book series can be classified as a
‘Kill the monster’ plot [24], while the many sub plots and connections between them complicate the
emotional arc of each individual book: this plot could not be readily inferred from the emotional arc alone.
The emotional arc shown here, captures the major highs and lows of the story, and should be familiar to any
reader well acquainted with Harry Potter. Our method does not pick up emotional moments discussed briefly,
perhaps in one paragraph or sentence (e.g., the first kiss of Harry and Ginny). We provide interactive
visualizations of all Project Gutenberg books at http://hedonometer.org/books/v3/1/ and a selection of classic
and popular books at http://hedonometer.org/books/v1/.

sentences scores, it begets a basic misunderstanding of similar efforts []. In Figure ,

we show the emotional arc of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the final book in
the popular Harry Potter series by JK Rowling. While the plot of the book is nested and
complicated, the emotional arc associated with each sub-narrative is clearly visible. We
analyze the emotional arcs corresponding to complete books, and to limit the conflation
of multiple core emotional arcs, we restrict our analysis to shorter books by selecting a
maximum number of words when building our filter. Further details of the emotional arc
construction can be found in Appendix C in Additional file .

2.2 Project Gutenberg corpus

For a suitable corpus we draw on the open access Project Gutenberg data set []. We
apply rough filters to the collection (roughly , books) in an attempt to obtain a
Reagan et al. EPJ Data Science ( 2016) 5:31 Page 4 of 12

set of books that represent English works of fiction. We start by selecting for only En-
glish books, with total words between , and ,, with more than  downloads
from the Project Gutenberg website, and with Library of Congress Class corresponding
to English fiction.a To ensure that the -download limit is not influencing the results
here, we further test each method for , , , and  download thresholds, in each
case confirming the  download findings to be qualitatively unchanged. Next, we re-
move books with any word in the title from a list of keywords (e.g., ‘poems’ and ‘collection’,
full list in Appendix C in Additional file ). From within this set of books, we remove
the front and back matter of each book using regular expression pattern matches that
match on .% of the books included. Two slices of the data for download count and
the total word count are shown in Appendix C, Figure S in Additional file . We pro-
vide a list of the book ID’s which are included for download in the Online Appendices
at http://compstorylab.org/share/papers/reaganb/, the books are listed in Table S
in Appendix D in Additional file , and we attempt to provide the Project Gutenberg
ID when we mention a book by title herein. Given the Project Gutenberg ID n, the raw
ebook is available online from Project Gutenberg at http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/n/,
e.g., Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, has ID  and is available at
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks//. We also provide an online, interactive version of
the emotional arc for each book indexed by the ID, e.g., Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
is available at http://hedonometer.org/books/v//.

2.3 Principal component analysis (SVD)

We use the standard linear algebra technique singular value decomposition (SVD) to find
a decomposition of stories onto an orthogonal basis of emotional arcs. Starting with the
sentiment time series for each book bi as row i in the matrix A, we apply the SVD to find

A = U!V T = WV T , ()

where U contains the projection of each sentiment time series onto each of the right sin-
gular vectors (rows of V T , eigenvectors of AT A), which have singular values given along
the diagonal of !, with W = U!. Different intuitive interpretations of the matrices U, !,
and V T are useful in the various domains in which the SVD is applied; here, we focus on
right singular vectors as an orthonormal basis for the sentiment time series in the rows of
A, which we will refer to as the modes. We combine ! and U into the single coefficient
matrix W for clarity and convenience, such that W now represents the mode coefficients.

2.4 Hierarchical clustering

We use Ward’s method to generate a hierarchical clustering of stories, which proceeds
by minimizing variance between clusters of books []. We use the mean-centered books
and the distance function

l
! " "
D(bi , bj ) = l– "bi (t) – bj (t)" ()
t=

for t indexing the window in books bi , bj to generate the distance matrix.

Reagan et al. EPJ Data Science ( 2016) 5:31 Page 5 of 12

2.5 Self-organizing map (SOM)

We implement a self-organized map (SOM), an unsupervised machine learning method
(a type of neural network) to cluster emotional arcs []. The SOM works by finding the
most similar emotional arc in a random collection of arcs. We use an  ×  SOM (for 
nodes, roughly % of the number of books), connected on a square grid, training according
to the original procedure (with winner take all, and scaling functions across both distance
and magnitude). We take the neighborhood influence function at iteration i as

# √ $
Nbdk (i) = j ∈ N |D(k, j) < N · (i + )α ()

for a node k in the set of nodes N , with distance function D given above and total number
of nodes N . For results shown here we take α = –.. We implement the learning adapta-
tion function at training iteration i as f (i) = (i + )β , again with β = –., a standard value
for the training hyper-parameters.

3 Results
We obtain a collection of , books that are mostly, but not all, fictional stories by using
metadata from Project Gutenberg to construct a rough filter. We find broad support for
the following six emotional arcs:
• ‘Rags to riches’ (rise).
• ‘Tragedy’, or ‘Riches to rags’ (fall).
• ‘Man in a hole’ (fall-rise).
• ‘Icarus’ (rise-fall).
• ‘Cinderella’ (rise-fall-rise).
• ‘Oedipus’ (fall-rise-fall).
Importantly, we obtain these same six emotional arcs from all possible arcs by observing
them as the result of three methods: As modes from a matrix decomposition by SVD, as
clusters in a hierarchical clustering using Ward’s algorithm, and as clusters using unsuper-
vised machine learning. We examine each of the results in this section.

3.1 Principal component analysis (SVD)

In Figure  we show the leading  modes in both the weighted (dark) and un-weighted
(lighter) representation. In total, the first  modes explain % and % of the variance
from the mean centered and raw time series, respectively. The modes are from mean-
centered emotional arcs, such that the first SVD mode need not extract the average from
the labMT scores nor the positivity bias present in language []. The coefficients for each
mode within a single emotional arc are both positive and negative, so we need to consider
both the modes and their negation. We can immediately recognize the familiar shapes of
core emotional arcs in the first four modes, and compositions of these emotional arcs in
modes  and . We observe ‘Rags to riches’ (mode , positive), ‘Tragedy’ or ‘Riches to rags’
(mode , negative), Vonnegut’s ‘Man in a hole’ (mode , positive), ‘Icarus’ (mode , nega-
tive), ‘Cinderella’ (mode , positive), ‘Oedipus’ (mode , negative). We choose to include
modes - only for completeness, as these high frequency modes have little contribu-
tion to variance and do not align with core emotional arc archetypes from other methods
(more below).
Reagan et al. EPJ Data Science ( 2016) 5:31 Page 6 of 12

Figure 3 Top 12 modes from the singular value decomposition of 1,327 Project Gutenberg books. We
show in a lighter color modes weighted by their corresponding singular value, where we have scaled the
matrix ! such that the first entry is 1 for comparison (for reference, the largest singular value is 34.5). The
mode coefficients normalized for each book are shown in the right panel accompanying each mode, in the
range –1 to 1, with the ‘Tukey’ box plot.

We emphasize that by definition of the SVD, the mode coefficients in W can be either
positive and negative, such that the modes themselves explain variance with both the pos-
itive and negative version. In the right panels of each mode in Figure  we project the ,
stories onto each of first six modes and show the resulting coefficients. While none are far
from  (as would be expected), mode  has a mean slightly above  and both modes  and
 have means slightly below . To sort the books by their coefficient for each mode, we
normalize the coefficients within each book in the rows of W to sum to , accounting for
books with higher total energy, and these are the coefficients shown in the right panels of
each mode in Figure . In Appendix E in Additional file , we provide supporting, intu-
itive details of the SVD method, as well as example emotional arc reconstruction using the
modes (see Figures S-S in Additional file ). As expected, less than  modes are enough
to reconstruct the emotional arc to a degree of accuracy visible to the eye.
We show labeled examples of the emotional arcs closest to the top  modes in Figure 
and Figure S in Additional file . We present both the positive and negative modes, and
the stories closest to each by sorting on the coefficient for that mode. For the positive sto-
ries, we sort in ascending order, and vice versa. Mode , which encompasses both the ‘Rags
to riches’ and ‘Tragedy’ emotional arcs, captures % of the variance of the entire space.
We examine the closest stories to both sides of modes -, and direct the reader to Fig-
ure S in Additional file  for more details on the higher order modes. The two stories that
have the most support from the ‘Rags to riches’ mode are The Winter’s Tale (,) and Os-
car Wilde, Art and Morality: A Defence of ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ (,). Among
Reagan et al. EPJ Data Science ( 2016) 5:31 Page 7 of 12

Figure 4 First 3 SVD modes and their negation with the closest stories to each. To locate the emotional
arcs on the same scale as the modes, we show the modes directly from the rows of V T and weight the
emotional arcs by the inverse of their coefficient in W for the particular mode. The closest stories shown for
each mode are those stories with emotional arcs which have the greatest coefficient in W. In parentheses for
each story is the Project Gutenberg ID and the number of downloads from the Project Gutenberg website,
respectively. Links below each story point to an interactive visualization on http://hedonometer.org which
enables detailed exploration of the emotional arc for the story.

the most categorical tragedies we find Lady Susan () and Warlord of Kor (,).
Number  in the sorted list of tragedies is perhaps the most famous tragedy: Romeo and
Juliet by William Shakespeare. Mode  is the ‘Man in a hole’ emotional arc, and we find
the stories which most closely follow this path to be The Magic of Oz () and Children of
the Frost (,). The negation of mode  most closely resembles the emotional arc of the
‘Icarus’ narrative. For this emotional arc, the most characteristic stories are Shadowings
(,) and Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (,). Mode  is the ‘Cinderella’ emo-
tional arc, and includes Mystery of the Hasty Arrow (,) and Through the Magic Dorr
(,). The negation of Mode , which we refer to as ‘Oedipus’, is found most characteris-
tically in This World is Taboo (,), Old Indian Days (), and The Evil Guest (,).
We also note that the spread of the stories from their core mode increases strongly for the
higher modes.

3.2 Hierarchical clustering

We show a dendrogram of the  clusters with highest linkage cost in Figure . The av-
erage silhouette coefficient is shown on the bottom of Figure , and the distributions of
silhouette values within each cluster (see Figures S and S in Additional file ) can be
used to analyze the appropriate number of clusters []. A characteristic book from each
cluster is shown on the leaf nodes by sorting the books within each cluster by the total
Reagan et al. EPJ Data Science ( 2016) 5:31 Page 8 of 12

Figure 5 Dendrogram from the hierarchical clustering procedure using Ward’s minimum variance
method. For each cluster, a selection of the 20 most central books to a fully-connected network of books are
shown along with the average of the emotional arc for all books in the cluster, along with the cluster ID and
number of books in each cluster (shown in parenthesis). The cluster ID is given by numbering the clusters in
order of linkage starting at 0, with each individual book representing a cluster of size 1 such that the final
cluster (all books) has the ID 2(N – 1) for the N = 1,327 books. At the bottom, we show the average Silhouette
value for all books, with higher value representing a more appropriate number of clusters. For each of the 60
leaf nodes (right side) we show the number of books within the cluster and the most central book to that
cluster’s book network.

distance to other books in the cluster (e.g., considering each intra-cluster collection as a
fully connected weighted network, we take the most central node), and in parenthesis the
number of books in that cluster. In other words, we label each cluster by considering the
network centrality of the fully connected cluster with edges weighted by the distance be-
tween stories. By cutting the dendrogram in Figure  at various linkage costs we are able
to extract clusters of the desired granularity. For the cuts labeled C, C, and C, we show
these clusters in Figures S, S, and S in Additional file . We find the first four of our
final six arcs appearing among the eight most different clusters (Figure S in Additional
file ).
The clustering method groups stories with a ‘Man in a hole’ emotional arc for a range
of different variances, separate from the other arcs, in total these clusters (panels A, E,
and I of Figure S in Additional file ) account for % of the Gutenberg corpus. The
remainder of the stories have emotional arcs that are clustered among the ‘Tragedy’ arc
(%), ‘Rags to riches’ arc (%), and the ‘Oedipus’ arc (%). A more detailed analysis of the
results from hierarchical clustering can be found in Appendix F in Additional file , and
this result generally agrees with other attempts that use only hierarchical clustering [].
Reagan et al. EPJ Data Science ( 2016) 5:31 Page 9 of 12

Figure 6 Results of the SOM applied to Project Gutenberg books. Left panel: Nodes on the 2D SOM grid
are shaded by the number of stories for which they are the winner. Right panel: The B-matrix shows that there
are clear clusters of stories in the 2D space imposed by the SOM network.

3.3 Self-organizing map (SOM)

Finally, we apply Kohonen’s self-organizing map (SOM) and find core arcs from unsu-
pervised machine learning on the emotional arcs. On the two dimensional component
plane, the prescribed network topology, we find seven spatially coherent groups, with five
emotional arcs. These spatial groups are comprised of stories with core emotional arcs of
differing variance.
In Figure  we see both the B-matrix to demonstrate the strength of spatial clustering
and a heat-map showing where we find the winning nodes. The A-I labels refer to the
individual nodes shown in Figure S in Additional file , and we observe seven spatial
groups in the both panels of Figure : () A and G, () B and I, () C, () D, () E, and () H,
and () F. These spatial clusters reinforce the visible similarity of the winning node arcs,
given that nodes H and F are close spatially but separated by the B-matrix and contain
very distinct arcs. We show the winning node emotional arcs and the arcs of books for
which they are the winners in Figure S in Additional file . The legend shows the node
ID, numbers the cluster by size, and in parentheses indicates the size of the cluster on
that individual node. In panels A and G we see varying strengths of the ‘Man in a hole’
emotional arc. In panels B and I, the second largest individual cluster consists of the ‘Rags
to riches’ arcs. In panel C, and in panel F, we find the ‘Oedipus’ emotional arc, with a more
pronounced positive start and decline in panel C. In panel D we see the ‘Icarus’ arc, and
in panel E and panel H we see the ‘Tragedy’ arc. Each of these top stories are all readily
identifiable, yet again demonstrating the universality of these story types.

3.4 Null comparison

There are many possible emotional arcs in the space that we consider. To demonstrate that
these specific arcs are uniquely compelling as stories written by and for homo narrativus,
we consider the true emotional arcs in relation to their most suitable comparison: the
book with randomly shuffled words (‘word salad’) and the resulting text from a -gram
Markov model trained on the individual book itself (‘nonsense’). We chose to compare
to ‘word salad’ and ‘nonsense’ versions as they are more representative of a null model:
written stories that are without coherent plot or structure to generate a coherent emo-
tional arc, which is not true of a stochastic process (e.g., a random walk model or noise).
Examples of the emotional arc and null emotional arcs for a single book are shown in Fig-
ure S in Additional file , with  ‘word salad’ and ‘nonsense’ versions. Sampled text
using each method is given in Appendix C in Additional file . We re-run each method on
Reagan et al. EPJ Data Science ( 2016) 5:31 Page 10 of 12

Figure 7 Download statistics for stories whose SVD Modes comprise more than 2.5% of books, for N
the total number of books and Nm the number corresponding to the particular mode. Modes SV 3
through -SV 4 (both polarities of modes 3 and 4) exhibit a higher average number of downloads and more
variance than the others. Mode arcs are rows of V T and the download distribution is show in log10 space from
20 to 30,000 downloads.

the English fiction Gutenberg Corpus with the null versions of each book and verify that
the emotional arcs of real stories are not simply an artifact. The singular value spectrum
from the SVD is flatter, with higher-frequency modes appearing more quickly, and in total
representing % of the total variance present in real stories (see Figures S and S in
Additional file ). Hierarchical clustering generates less distinct clusters with considerably
lower linkage cost (final linkage cost , vs ,) for the emotional arcs from nonsense
books, and the winning node vectors on a self-organizing map lack coherent structure (see
Figures S and S in Appendix H in Additional file ).

3.5 The success of stories

To examine how the emotional trajectory impacts success, in Figure  we examine the
downloads for all of the books that are most similar to each SVD mode (for additional
modes, see Figure S in Appendix B in Additional file ). We find that the first four modes,
which contain the greatest total number of books, are not the most popular. Along with the
negative of mode , both polarities of modes  and  have markedly higher median down-
loads, while we discount the importance of the mean with the high variance. The success
of the stories underlying these emotional arcs suggests that the emotional experience of
readers strongly affects how stories are shared. We find ‘Icarus’ (-SV ), ‘Oedipus’ (-SV ),
and two sequential ‘Man in a hole’ arcs (SV ), are the three most successful emotional
arcs. These results are influenced by individual books within each mode which have high
numbers of downloads, and we refer the reader to the download-sorted tables for each
mode in Appendix E in Additional file .

4 Conclusion
Using three distinct methods, we have demonstrated that there is strong support for six
core emotional arcs. Our methodology brings to bear a cross section of data science tools
with a knowledge of the potential issues that each present. We have also shown that con-
sideration of the emotional arc for a given story is important for the success of that story.
Of course, downloads are only a rough proxy for success, and this work may provide an
outline for more detailed analysis of the factors that impact meaningful measures of suc-
cess, i.e., sales or cultural influence.
Our approach could be applied in the opposite direction: namely by beginning with the
emotional arc and aiding in the generation of compelling stories []. Understanding the
emotional arcs of stories may be useful to aid in constructing arguments [] and teaching
common sense to artificial intelligence systems [].
Reagan et al. EPJ Data Science ( 2016) 5:31 Page 11 of 12

Extensions of our analysis that use a more curated selection of full-text fiction can an-
swer more detailed questions about which stories are the most popular throughout time,
and across regions []. Automatic extraction of character networks would allow a more
detailed analysis of plot structure for the Project Gutenberg corpus used here [, , ].
Bridging the gap between the full text stories [] and systems that analyze plot sequences
will allow such systems to undertake studies of this scale []. Place could also be used to
consider separate character networks through time, and to help build an analog to Randall
Munroe’s Movie narrative charts [].
We are producing data at an ever increasing rate, including rich sources of stories writ-
ten to entertain and share knowledge, from books to television series to news. Of profound
scientific interest will be the degree to which we can eventually understand the full land-
scape of human stories, and data driven approaches will play a crucial role.

Additional material

Additional file 1: Supplementary material (as Appendices A-H). (pdf )

Competing interests
The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Authors’ contributions
All authors contributed equally to the writing of this paper. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Author details
1
University of Vermont, 85 South Prospect St, Burlington, VT 05405, USA. 2 University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA 5005,
Australia.

Acknowledgements
PSD and CMD acknowledge support from NSF Big Data Grant #1447634.

Endnote
a
The specific classes have labels PN, PR, PS, and PZ.

Received: 2 July 2016 Accepted: 26 October 2016

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