Autobiographical memories (AMs) are partly influenced by people's ability to process and express their emotions. This study investigated the extent to which trait emotional intelligence (EI) contributed to the emotional vocabulary of 148 adolescents – 60 speakers of Spanish as a heritage language (HL) raised in Germany, 61 first-language (L1) German speakers and 27 L1 Spanish speakers – in their written AMs of anger and surprise. The results revealed that heritage speakers with high trait EI used more emotional words in their AMs. These bilinguals also used more positive, negative and high-arousal words in their HL and in their AMs of anger. Similar patterns were observed in the AMs produced in Spanish (HL and L1), but L1 Spanish speakers used more emotional words in their AMs of surprise. By contrast, L1 German speakers used more emotional words than bilinguals in their AMs in German, and AMs of anger in German included more emotional vocabulary than those addressing surprise events.

This article bridges a gap in the study of Aristophanic humour by better demonstrating how individual jokes (in this case, the para prosdokian ‘contrary to expectation’ joke) contribute to the wider comic scenes in which they are embedded. After analysing ancient and modern explanations and examples of para prosdokian jokes, this paper introduces the concept of ‘comic bit’, a discrete unit of comedy that builds humour around a central premise, and establishes how para prosdokian jokes contribute to comic bits in a way that recent theories of para prosdokian cannot account for.

This paper examines the role of prosody in a little-studied type of non-canonical questions: syntactically and lexically canonical interrogative sentences that have been uttered by the speaker in order to express surprise. The study compares Estonian surprise questions with string-identical information-seeking questions elicited by means of context descriptions. The materials comprise 1,008 utterances by 21 speakers.

It is concluded that the prosody of the examined utterances has three roles that are relevant to the expression of surprise by ordinary interrogative sentences. First, the enhanced prosodic realisation of the utterances as manifested in a longer duration, a wider pitch range, and a more frequent occurrence of upstepped pitch accents conveys emotional expressivity. Second, lower pitch along with the creaky voice quality signals that the utterances are not canonical questions, while the main prosodic correlate of information-seeking questions is high pitch. Phonological pitch accents and boundary tones, however, are not used to distinguish between surprise questions and information-seeking questions. Third, the nuclear accent placement signals an information structure that is associated with the expression of incongruity or counterexpectation: the focal accent can evoke an alternative (set) that arises from the speaker’s expectations.

This project investigates the intonation of canonical (information-seeking) and non-canonical wh-in-situ echo questions conveying repetition and surprise in Northern Peninsular Spanish. Data from 14 female participants were collected via a contextualised elicitation task. The following correlates were examined: (i) the melodic curve of the wh-in-situ question, (ii) the nuclear peak (in Hz), (iii) the wh-tonal range (i.e. the difference between the lowest nuclear Low and the highest boundary High), and (iv) the nuclear contour. Results show that all wh-in-situ questions investigated display similar melodic curves and nuclear contours, but canonical questions have significantly lower nuclear peaks and wh-tonal ranges than non-canonical questions. Echo-repetition and echo-surprise questions also differ in nuclear peak and wh-tonal range. We propose a tentative analysis, whereby canonical in-situ questions have a final H% boundary tone, in contrast to non-canonical questions, which have an extra-High (upstepped) final boundary tone (¡H%).

The paper introduces guidelines to support designers to generate ideas for the development of surprising products. The guidelines are structured coherently with the concept of sensory incongruity and the Function-Behaviour-Structure framework to create a mismatch between previously conceived expectations and product features. The usability of the interactive presentation is checked with an experiment that involved more than 30 subjects with a background in product design (mechanical engineers and industrial designers), which demonstrated to be capable of generating ideas using the same.

This paper defends an account of moral shock as an emotional response to intensely bewildering events that are also of moral significance. This theory stands in contrast to the common view that shock is a form of intense surprise. On the standard model of surprise, surprise is an emotional response to events that violated one's expectations. But I show that we can be morally shocked by events that confirm our expectations. What makes an event shocking is not that it violated one's expectations, but that the content of the event is intensely bewildering (and bewildering events are often, but not always, contrary to our expectations). What causes moral shock is, I argue, our lack of emotional preparedness for the event. And I show that, despite the relative lack of attention to shock in the philosophical literature, the emotion is significant to moral, social, and political life.

I develop an account of productive surprise as an epistemic virtue of scientific investigations which does not turn on psychology alone. On my account, a scientific investigation is potentially productively surprising when (1) results can conflict with epistemic expectations, (2) those expectations pertain to a wide set of subjects. I argue that there are two sources of such surprise in science. One source, often identified with experiments, involves bringing our theoretical ideas in contact with new empirical observations. Another, often identified with simulations, involves articulating and bringing together different parts of our knowledge. Both experiments and simulations, then, can surprise.