Surprise can be defined as a short lived mental and physiological emotional

reaction to an unexpected event. The event can be anything relating to a

sudden external sensory physical stimulus or relating to a social interaction or
conversation. This emotional reaction can also vary in intensity depending on
the person and the unexpected event he or she is in. This variation in the
intensity of experiencing surprise comes from a theory relating to schemas,
which is the culmination of knowledge acquired by a person throughout his life
that make up their belief systems. Whenever an unexpected event takes place
the person refers to their schema to establish the existing knowledge about the
event. If the event has less discrepancy with the schema then the level of
surprise is low, but if there is no information to correlate with in the schema then
the level of surprise is high. There is also a distinctive facial expression associated
with the emotion of surprise, and other bodily reactions such as elevation of
heart rate, or sweaty palms, which is why it’s also a physiological activity. These
physiological factors started by surprise are also like those experienced by a
person when they are in stress.

While the emotion of surprise itself isn’t a contributor to stress but the response
after experiencing surprise might induce stress. These stressful responses can
either be short lived or have long term psychological effect going as far as post
traumatic stress disorder. Post traumatic stress disorder happens to a special
case where the effects of surprise turn into stress for a longer duration because
the person may have experienced something that is completely unexpected
and has no relevance in their schema. This then leads to an updating of the
schema depending on the perception of the person to the experienced
unexpected event and forming of a completely different behaviour than what
they normally do, that makes them cautious of such events in future. For
example, the survivor of a plane crash may suffer from post-traumatic stress
disorder or survivors’ guilt and hence would be vary of travelling by a plane next
time or may avoid it altogether.

The process that a person goes through while being surprised is such that an
unexpected stimulus is given more attention than the ongoing activity and the
person refocuses their mental resources towards the unexpected stimulus, all the
while correlating it with their schema, it makes the person curious if there’s any
discrepancy with the schema and hence a longer response and more resources
is focused towards the unexpected event. It is in this way that it is theorised that
learning happens through surprise. This aspect of learning through surprise is very
evident in case of children as they have a limited schema and every new event
is a surprise for them which then helps in updating their schema.

A response after a unexpected event may also involve a stressful situation of

surviving that event. How a person behaves in that particular scenario still needs
more research.