They found stories tended towards six ‘emotional arcs’: Rags to Riches (characterised by rising emotion); Riches to Rags (tragedies, characterised by falling emotion); Man in a Hole (a fall then a rise); Icarus (a rise then a fall); Oedipus (fall, rise, fall). The most commercially successful emotional arcs, they found, were Icarus, Oedipus and ‘two sequential Man in a Holes’.
