Berlyne arousal curve / Wundt curve (Berlyne)

Hedonic value = an inverted-U of arousal potential

Interest and pleasure rise with a stimulus's arousal potential — driven by Berlyne's collative variables (novelty, complexity, uncertainty, conflict; for aesthetics he stressed novelty, surprisingness, complexity, ambiguity, puzzlingness) — then fall past an optimum. Too little (familiar, simple, predictable) is boring; too much (chaotic, incomprehensible, overwhelming) is aversive. The peak is at intermediate arousal potential.

Inverted-U form = there is an optimum, and both tails fail. Unlike the monotone "more surprise = better," this says the sweet spot is moderate novelty/complexity — enough to break the prior, not so much it can't be processed.

Transfer. Sets the ceiling that rescorla-wagner and anti-mid alone miss: a hook needs surprise, but surprise that can still be integrated. The winning register is familiar enough to parse, novel enough to matter — the reason pure shock or pure incomprehensibility both underperform, and why the sharpest content pairs a novel claim with a legible frame. Also the case against maximal cut-density / sensory overload in video.

Kin: illustrative-formulas · rescorla-wagner · anti-mid · loewenstein-information-gap (intermediate gap = intermediate arousal) · processing-fluency.

Source: Daniel Berlyne, Conflict, Arousal, and Curiosity (McGraw-Hill, 1960) and Aesthetics and Psychobiology (1971) — "collative variables" and the arousal-potential curve; builds on the Wundt curve (Wilhelm Wundt). Web-verified 2026-07-18.