 While philosophers have long offered theories to resolve this “paradox of tragedy,” only one substantial study of it claims to be grounded in empirical research. Menninghaus and colleagues propose what they call the “the Distancing-Embracing model” (Menninghaus, Wagner, Hanich, et al. 2017) according to which an aesthetic context, as with watching a play or film, distances us from the situation represented and allows the positive effects of tragic emotions, notably their capacity to focus attention, to sustain them. While a large and relevant body of empirical work is called on in support of the idea, its theoretical commitments are unclear. In some of their formulations the function of distancing seems to be the reduction in unpleasantness of negative emotions to the point where they are “not inevitably incompatible with art-specific expectations of hedonic reward” (2017: 6); this leaves them open to the charge made against compensation theories that the work’s being apt to generate negative emotions seems to be a major factor in attracting people to the work, rather than something negative we can be persuaded to live with. In other formulations they speak of the factors “involved in making negative emotions enjoyable” (2017: 3), which suggests the conversion theory. Yet they claim that their theory is a version of neither of these approaches (2017: 15; see S. Davies 1997). (For more on the relationship between fiction and emotion see the supplement to Liao &amp; Gendler 2018 [2020]). See below,  Section 7  for further remarks on fiction and emotion.