Do readers like stories with happy endings better than unhappy or open ones, and what do open-access experiments actually measure about it?

The clearest open evidence is Klauk, Köppe and Weskott (Diegesis 2016, read from an Internet Archive snapshot): 24 literary-studies students rated 24 three-sentence texts with positive, negative, delayed or open last sentences. Readers liked the positive ending more than the negative one (4.69 vs 3.55 on 1-7), but did not like the whole text more (4.10 vs 3.94), and rated the positive and negative texts equally complete (5.76 vs 5.79); the open ending was rated much less complete, expected, sound and coherent. A 308-reader dissertation found more identification after a happy ending, and a 2025 film study found no main effect of a tragic death at the end rather than the start on reflection. Short constructed texts and student samples limit all of this, and no open study found measured enjoyment against appreciation across ending types. Curator qualifications: All Klauk et al. numbers verified in Table 1. The film-paper abstract-vs-results tension is confirmed as a reporting-emphasis issue: the abstract foregrounds a subgroup effect, while the statistics show no main effect. The Brewer discrepancy is authors-reported (Brewer not read). The rights_conflicts entry lists different works with different licences (CC BY-NC-ND article, all-rights dissertation, CC BY paper). That is not a conflict; remove it and keep per-source terms (as in C3R-0189/0190). Chung dissertation (S7) claims not re-read in this pass. Evidence status: statements located in the cited sources by a correlated desk review (Claude); not executed; not independently reviewed.

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