Talk:Suspense

zeigarnik effect
I will a merger suggestion from zeigarnik effect to here, because I firmly believe it to be identical. I wrote an opinion piece on it about fifteen years ago that, in English, illustrated the effect, just a little bit in the exemplary way. BrewJay (talk) 10:24, 9 July 2008 (UTC)


 * Why does Zeigarnik effect redirect to this page? Suspense as a dramatic device is a much larger concept than the Zeigarnik effect, a well-known cognitive bias that should be described in its own specific context.  --Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.75.54.10 (talk) 17:17, 7 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Thank you Rapscallion for finding and restoring the text on the "Zeigarnik Effect". I trust that you don't mind me changing the section name to Suspense as education was just one aspect of it. -- Thinking of England (talk) 08:57, 12 August 2009 (UTC)


 * What is frustrating to me is that "Zeigarnik Effect" is not mentioned at all in this article... I had to go rooting around the internet to get the idea. Did the reference get deleted?  I'm tempted to add at least a link to the article on Bluma Zeigarnik, but that article only mentions that she discovered it... and that's about it; I don't feel qualified to write much on the topic other than, say, paraphrasing her work (assuming I could find it).  Got here from article Twist ending re movies. -Rapscallion (talk) 14:31, 2 August 2009 (UTC)


 * It can be undone. A vote for it being undone is on Talk:Zeigarnik_effect, and someone changed the education heading to "Zeigarnik Effect" since the merjer was completed, which was not necessary, because it was already in the text (his complaint was that it was not in the text). A lot of the scholarly references came from Zeigarnik Effect, so if anyone is sure that the lead sentence for Zeigarnik Effect does not explain a connection, then I can either undo the merjer or go into more depth with a connection. 216.234.170.98 (talk) 05:43, 12 August 2009 (UTC)


 * I don't see the vote there that you speak of -- just a question about where the content went (before) Rapscallion restored it here. Are you suggesting that if should be unmerged, and if so, why?  I'm not necessarily opposed to it, but I've only heard issue raised with the missing content, not with the merger itself.  -- Thinking of England (talk) 08:57, 12 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Looks like the deal is done at the moment. I will try to read other languages and see if anything else can be said about this, because the translations are not unanimous. 216.234.170.99 (talk) 23:06, 13 August 2009 (UTC)


 * The leftward language was tricky (four buttons reversed, kept looking for save on the left), and all languages referred to here are mirrored at destinations.216.234.170.99 (talk) 01:56, 14 August 2009 (UTC)


 * 216.234.170.99, I appreciate what you are doing, but I don't think your pronunciation works: Zeigarnik (Zawee ''-gawr-nik' ) effect.
 * WP:PRON does say we should use IPA, and that other styles may be used only in addition. I assume that you are using a "pronunciation respelling", but I can't make sense of it.  Did you really mean "Zaweeg", and how do you say "gawr"?  ("nik" I can handle.)  Perhaps my psychology professors overly Americanized it, but they used a straight forward pronunciation of three syllables, the first with the expected diphthong, the second carrying the stress.  This is my first attempt at IPA, but here is how I understand it: Zeigarnik effect .  I have not yet been able to locate any reference giving its pronunciation, and I've not attempted to tackle WP:IPA for Russian. -- Thinking of England (talk) 20:44, 14 August 2009 (UTC)


 * I have never heard of this effect before, but right off the bat it looks like a claim that needs to be put under scientific scrutiny, because I think that yet again it is coming about from someone not understanding the difference between cause and effect. See the wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation. It is not just entirely plausible but extremely likely because Akham's Razor favors this conclusion, that even if this is an observable phenomenon, that people remember uncompleted tasks better than completed ones not because of a direct relation between uncompleted tasks and how well they remember it, but because they TRY to remember uncompleted tasks for their own reasons. In other words, the waiter makes an EFFORT to remember the orders that haven't been paid for and consciously decides the ones that have been paid for no longer matter and can be forgotten about. Then this whole "effect" would simply come about from a much broader phenomenon that makes more sense from an engineering perspective of the human brain, that people remember things they actively try to remember better than things they decide it is ok to forget about! This is just like the rationale that students should be forced to take more advanced math classes because those who do on average make more money when they get jobs; it isn't taking the more advanced math classes that causes this, it is that the smarter people ELECT to take the more advanced math classes, and the smarter people make more money when they get jobs! The most extreme example of this fallacy I have heard is the point made by the fake religion Pastafarianism, a satirical argument that the decline of pirates on the open sea is the cause of global warming. Clearly with the passage of time, there has been a decline of pirates, and a rise in global warming, but both of these are effects of a common cause, the passage of time, one does not cause the other. In that case, it wouldn't help in the least to have uncompleted study sessions. An example more directly related to this one would be like if I rent a bunch of DVDs and save them on my hard drive until I watch them to the very end, at which point I delete them. Some extremely naive observer to this who doesn't understand the motivation for my use of the deletion function might conclude that the computer is better at remembering movies when they have not been played to the very end, because they get deleted when the movies are played to the very end, and thus suggests that in the interest of better preserving movies, that they should not be viewed to the very end so that they are not deleted. --Preceding unsigned comment added by 97.120.198.175 (talk) 17:01, 7 March 2011 (UTC)


 * It really is not at all clear in this page how the Zeigarnik Effect relates to "the feeling of pleasurable fascination and excitement mixed with apprehension, tension, and anxiety developed from a unpredictable, mysterious, and rousing source of entertainment" that summarizes what suspense is as the current first sentence of this article. It doesn't seem appropriate here, but if it really is then some more effort should be made to connect the two rather than just bolding the word "suspend" as if that phrasing makes it obvious. Vttale (talk) 15:32, 23 April 2013 (UTC)


 * I noticed that Zeigarnik Effect was defined both here and as a section under the Bluma Zeigarnik article. I have changed the redirect and added a "Main article" reference here pointing to the other article as I believe that is a far more appropriate place for an authoritative description of the term.  I do agree with other comments in that I'm dubious whether this section belongs in this article at all, as it does not even attempt to explain how the effect relates to the concept of suspense (the Zeigarnik Effect is explicitly about memory recall, not emotional response).  While it is possible that it deserves mention here, I suspect the section should be rewritten to be more appropriate to this article, or possibly just dropped entirely.. -- Foogod (talk) 21:22, 9 May 2013 (UTC)

In Popular Media
This section does not address "suspense" as it relates to popular media. It links to thriller as genre, which is relevant, but the rest of the section only discusses suspense generally. Also, it is not academic language. I recommended incorporating some of this information into the general suspense section and removing the rest. — Preceding unsigned comment added by J Andy Kane (talk • contribs) 20:06, 22 March 2014 (UTC)