Near-miss experiences are one of the main sources of intense emotions.
Despite people's consistency when judging near-miss situations and when
communicating about them, there is no integrated theoretical account of the
phenomenon. In particular, individuals' reaction to near-miss situations is not
correctly predicted by rationality-based or probability-based optimization. The
present study suggests that emotional intensity in the case of near-miss is in
part predicted by Simplicity Theory.Comment: jld-11040601; Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference of the
Cognitive Science Society, Austin, TX : United States (2011
