Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Frederic Bartlett pioneered the research on serial reproduction in 1932 and suggested that the stereotypical or schematicform of narratives consists in rationalization, a causal connection within a story and its plot. We conducted the largestretelling experiment to date with two different studies (19,086 retellings; 12,840 participants) that both reach the conclu-sion that retelling of narratives is focused on the precise preservation of the storys degree of happiness and sadness, evenwhen many other aspects related to coherence and rationalization of the story deteriorate. These findings, supported by anovel statistical model with Bayesian estimation, suggest that the happiness and sadness of a story operates as the anchorof stability for both reception-encoding and for reproduction-retrieval of narratives. We suggest that happiness and sadnessin narratives function not simply as discrete emotions, but also as verdicts concerning the outcome of a story.