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What makes something confusing? Confusion is a common response to challenging, abstract, and complex works, but it has received little attention in psychology. Based on appraisal theories of emotion, I suggest that confusion and interest have different positions in a two-dimensional appraisal space: interesting things stem from appraisals of high novelty and high comprehensibility, and confusing things stem from appraisals of high novelty and low comprehensibility. Two studies—a multilevel correlational study and an experiment that manipulated comprehensibility—found support for this appraisal model. Confusion and interest are thus close relatives in the family of knowledge emotions.
Paul J. Silvia (Sat,) studied this question.
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