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Some researchers claim that uncertainty prolongs the duration of emotional experiences because uncertainty toward an emotion-eliciting event prolongs attention to that event. However, some results contradict this claim. We assumed that curiosity rather than uncertainty prolongs the duration of emotional experience via attention, and that attention and emotional experience are prolonged only when uncertainty elicits curiosity. This assumption is based on the information gap theory, which proposes that curiosity increases with uncertainty, but that curiosity decreases at a certain level of uncertainty. We conducted a survey study to investigate the relationships among curiosity, uncertainty, attention and duration of positive and negative emotional experiences. The results showed that curiosity, but not uncertainty, prolonged the duration of emotional experiences and the process was completely mediated by attention both for positive and negative emotions. Moreover, uncertainty prolonged the duration of emotional experiences only when uncertainty elicited curiosity, which in turn prolonged attention to the emotion-eliciting event.

We propose a new excitation method for surface polaritons of an evanescent mode which cannot be excited by the attenuated total reflection method. We designed and produced a thin‐film waveguide to excite surface polaritons of evanescent modes at a Ag‐SiO2 interface. If the wave number of the optical guided waves propagating in the dielectric thin‐film waveguide (SiO2/Ta2O5/SiO2) is equal to the wave number of the surface polaritons, then a coupling between the two modes occurs. We can confirm the excitation of the surface polaritons by an attenuation of the optical guided waves.