Emotional Sequencing and Development in Fairy Tales

Affect is a transient phenomenon, with emotions tending to blend and interact over time [4]. This paper discusses emotional distributions in child-directed texts. It provides statistical evidence for the relevance of emotional sequencing, and evaluates trends of emotional story development, based on annotation statistics on 22 Grimms’ fairy tales which form part of a larger on-going text-annotation project that is also introduced. The study is motivated by the need for exploring features for text-based emotion prediction at the sentence-level, for use in expressive text-to-speech synthesis of children’s stories.