Humans spike attention to events that deviate from their expectations. When expectations are violated, the deviations are consolidated in memory and adjust future predictions. The magnitude of deviation from expectation will incite emotional responses that reflect the deviation from prediction.

It should be noted that for any given amount of stimulus, negative affect is felt with twice the magnitude of positive affect. That is to say that for an equally weighted experience, a negative emotion will be felt twice the magnitude of positive emotion. There are obvious evolutionary survival reasons for this. Narrators should consider how to use expectation deviation to corral engagement while maintaining integrity to expand audience and maintain their attention.

Dopamine is a exteroceptive attention neurotransmitter that regulates focus towards a goal or outcome. Outcomes that fail cause dopamine reward prediction processing in the brain to cascade emotional affect and reorient memory storage neuroplasticity to learn about deviations from the norm.