Construct · 7 fields · 14 citations
One name. Different field. Different construct. One map.
● jingle · one name, six constructs Nearest construct by meaningparadoxcompare the meaningsEvery construct on the map is compared with every other by the meaning of its definitions, and the closest one is surfaced here. The nearest construct to tension is paradox.
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The state of a body being pulled apart: the internal force per unit cross-section that resists elongation, positive by convention where compression is negative. A tensile test stretches a specimen and records stress against strain, and the yield point, ultimate strength and fracture that come off that curve are the material's whole mechanical identity. Surface tension is the same word for a different quantity, the energy per unit area, or force per unit length, that makes a liquid surface behave like a stretched membrane; Young's 1805 essay on the cohesion of fluids fixed the contact-angle relation that still carries his name. In both cases tension is a number with a unit and a failure criterion, and it has no feelings about being released.[1][2]
The listener's meaning that a musical moment is unstable and pulling toward resolution, a dissonance wanting to resolve, a dominant wanting its tonic, a rising line wanting to fall. Lerdahl and Jackendoff built it into the structure of tonal music in 1983: prolongational reduction represents a piece as a tree of tensing and relaxing events, and the analysis predicts where a trained listener will hear the pull. Farbood turned the prediction into a measurement in 2012, having listeners move a slider continuously while they listened and modelling the trace as a weighted, lagged sum of harmony, pitch height, loudness, onset rate and other features. Tension here is felt, is built on purpose, and is the point: a piece with no tension is not restful, it is boring.[3][4]
The reader's or viewer's state of concern about what will happen to a character they care about, sustained by uncertainty and by the delay of the outcome. Zillmann fixed the affective account in 1980: suspense is empathic distress on behalf of a liked protagonist facing a feared outcome, and the resolution is enjoyed in proportion to the distress that preceded it. Brewer and Lichtenstein made it structural in 1982: the same events told in a different order produce suspense, surprise or curiosity, and stories are liked to the extent the discourse arranges the events to produce one of them and then resolve it. Tension is manufactured by ordering and withholding, and it is measured by asking the audience.[5][6]
Two meanings from the same decade. Festinger's 1957 theory made tension the motor of cognition: holding two inconsistent cognitions is uncomfortable in the way hunger is uncomfortable, and the person changes a belief, adds a justification or avoids information until the discomfort goes. Thayer's biopsychology of mood treats tension as one of two arousal systems, a tense–calm axis separate from the energetic–tired axis, so that a person can be wound up and exhausted at once; his Activation–Deactivation Adjective Check List has asked people to rate themselves on adjectives for both since the 1960s. What separates this meaning from the musical and narrative ones is that the tension is unwanted and the person is trying to make it stop.[7][8][9]
Hostility between groups that is present before it is expressed, and that may be expressed in ways that either tear the groups apart or hold them together. Coser argued in 1956, against a functionalism that saw conflict only as breakdown, that conflict with an outsider tightens a group's boundaries and that safety-valve institutions let tension discharge without destroying the relationship. Sherif's Robbers Cave study of 1961 manufactured the thing in a summer camp: two groups of boys made hostile by competition for scarce prizes, and reconciled only by goals neither could reach alone. Tension in this meaning belongs to a relationship between collectives, and the individual members feel it as loyalty and hostility rather than as discomfort.[10][11]
A contradiction between two demands that are both legitimate, both necessary, and impossible to satisfy at once, stability and change, control and autonomy, exploring new possibilities and exploiting known ones. March fixed the canonical pair in 1991: exploration and exploitation compete for the same scarce attention, and systems that favour either alone destroy themselves in different ways. Smith and Lewis made tension itself the object of theory in 2011, defining a paradox as contradictory yet interrelated elements that persist over time and prescribing a dynamic equilibrium of iterating between poles rather than a choice. This is the one meaning on the page in which resolving the tension is the mistake.[12][13]
In sociology of religion, tension refers to the degree to which a religious group accepts or rejects its social environment, used to place groups between church and sect. This meaning comes from Johnson (1963) in American Sociological Review.[14]
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