Surprise

What is surprise?

Surprise is an emotion that arises from a detected mismatch between expectation and experience.^1,2 The emotion is characterised by a sense of difficulty to explain how or why something happened, and is believed to motivate us to seek explanations and to make sense of the world.^3,4

What is the role of expectations and predictions for our lives? In recent years, findings suggest that the human brain is not entirely reliant upon external information (through vision, smell, touch etc.). Instead, memories of previous experiences and statistical learning are used to produce predictions about current and future states.

How is surprise expressed?

Surprise is assumed to be typically expressed by raised eyebrows, an open mouth, a gasp or intake of air, as well as dilation of the pupils.⁵ From an evolutionary point of view, this behaviour is assumed to maximise the intake of information from the environment.

Research investigating young children’s ability to discriminate between different emotions has found that, whilst happiness and sadness can be distinguished from a very early age, surprise recognition develops slightly later.⁶ Interestingly, fear and surprise expressions are often difficult to differentiate, which may be related to the number of similarities shared by facial patterns of the two emotions, including the raised inner and outer brow, the raised upper eyelid, and the open mouth.⁷

Surprise expressions develop gradually with age – whilst only 30% of 3.5-month-old infants show surprise, roughly 67% of 5.5-month-old infants display surprise. This may be encouraged by caregivers’ interactions with their children as some research has shown that mothers display exaggerated surprise expressions towards their infant.⁸

Cultural differences have been shown to exist for surprise causes and responses. For example, caretakers in East Asia have been found to express less surprise than people from Western cultures.⁹ This may be due to social norms, as researchers found that when the East Asian participants were asked to display less emotional control, they showed surprise responses similar to the American participants.¹⁰

What causes surprise?

Surprise is triggered by unexpected events. This could be hearing a loud sound suddenly next to you or seeing a person you know in a place you would not think they would be at. The key aspect here is the unexpectedness, as you cannot be surprised by something you know is going to happen.

Research often use surprise or surprise responses such as longer looking times or dilated pupils to measure what children know about the world. For example, there have been experiments which looked at children’s development of knowledge about intuitive physics (how do two objects behave when they clash with each other) or measuring if children form expectations based on probability.¹¹

Good to know: Surprise and Learning

Surprise is an emotion that has been linked to exploration and learning.¹² Research suggests a chain reaction in which a person’s expectations are defied, resulting in surprise, which leads to curiosity/confusion/interest, then exploration of the stimulus that triggered this process, which finally results in learning.¹³

Research has found that ‘desirable difficulties’, challenges that push children to seek knowledge, lead to more curious behaviour which encourages memory and learning.¹⁴ However, there is a possibility that presenting children with too much new and surprising information can cause children to feel overwhelmed, anxious and confused – as with everything, balance is important!

Here is an example of the texts on surprise we included in the Games:

Artwork

Illustrations provided by Allysa Adams

www.allysaadamsillustration.com

References

Barto, Andrew, Marco Mirolli, and Gianluca Baldassarre. "Novelty or surprise?." Frontiers in psychology 4 (2013): 907.
Ekman, Paul. "Strong evidence for universals in facial expressions: a reply to Russell's mistaken critique." (1994): 268.
Foster, Meadhbh I., and Mark T. Keane. "Why some surprises are more surprising than others: Surprise as a metacognitive sense of explanatory difficulty." Cognitive psychology 81 (2015): 74-116.
Maguire, Rebecca, Phil Maguire, and Mark T. Keane. "Making sense of surprise: an investigation of the factors influencing surprise judgments." Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 37, no. 1 (2011): 176.
Ekman, Paul. "Darwin, deception, and facial expression." Annals of the new York Academy of sciences 1000, no. 1 (2003): 205-221.
Widen, Sherri C. "Children’s interpretation of facial expressions: The long path from valence-based to specific discrete categories." Emotion Review 5, no. 1 (2013): 72-77.
Jack, Rachael E., Wei Sun, Ioannis Delis, Oliver GB Garrod, and Philippe G. Schyns. "Four not six: Revealing culturally common facial expressions of emotion." Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 145, no. 6 (2016): 708.
Reissland, Nadja, John Shepherd, and Lily Cowie. "The melody of surprise: Maternal surprise vocalizations during play with her infant." Infant and Child Development: An International Journal of Research and Practice 11, no. 3 (2002): 271-278.
Choi, Incheol, and Richard E. Nisbett. "Cultural psychology of surprise: holistic theories and recognition of contradiction." Journal of personality and social psychology 79, no. 6 (2000): 890.
Valenzuela, Ana, Barbara Mellers, and Judi Strebel. "Pleasurable surprises: A cross-cultural study of consumer responses to unexpected incentives." Journal of Consumer Research 36, no. 5 (2010): 792-805.
Doan, Tiffany, Ori Friedman, and Stephanie Denison. "Beyond belief: The probability-based notion of surprise in children." Emotion 18, no. 8 (2018): 1163.
Wentworth, Naomi, and Sam L. Witryol. "What's new? Three dimensions for defining novelty." The Journal of genetic psychology 147, no. 2 (1986): 209-218.
Stahl, Aimee E., and Lisa Feigenson. "Observing the unexpected enhances infants’ learning and exploration." Science 348, no. 6230 (2015): 91-94.
Fandakova, Yana, and Matthias J. Gruber. "States of curiosity and interest enhance memory differently in adolescents and in children." Developmental Science 24, no. 1 (2021): e13005.