UC Irvine

Forecast and remembered emotion play an important role in people’s decisions and may influence their personal happiness and well-being. Chapter 1 provides an overview of this three-part dissertation. Across five studies, we investigated how affective forecasts are influenced by social aspirations, shape people’s decisions, and motivate goal-directed action. In Chapter 2, we demonstrate that religion, an aspirational source of social identity, predicts people's beliefs about how they should feel in the wake of a negative life event. In two studies, more religious participants reported greater satisfaction with life and forecast that they would feel less unhappiness about a negative outcome – a poor exam grade. Yet religiosity was not associated with experiencing less unhappiness following a negative outcome, even when participants’ religious identity was primed. The association between religiosity and life satisfaction was fully mediated by self-enhancement. These findings suggest that reports of life satisfaction and effective coping among religious people stem partly from their expectations about how they should feel, rather than from how they actually do feel, following negative events. In Chapter 3, we compared forecasts of emotional intensity, frequency, and duration. We assessed which of these features of their future emotional experience people forecast in order to make important life decisions. We also evaluated whether the features of forecast emotion that people relied on more when making decisions were the ones they forecast more accurately. In Study 1, undergraduates reported relying more on forecast emotional intensity than frequency or duration to decide which colleges to apply to. In Study 2, a three-part longitudinal study, fourth year medical students reported relying more on forecast emotional intensity than frequency or duration to decide how to rank residency programs in preparation for being matched with a program. Medical students were also most accurate when forecasting the intensity of their emotional response to matching with their program. Further, more accurate forecasts of emotional intensity were associated with positive outcomes, including being matched with a more favored residency program and being more satisfied with that program. Greater reliance on, and more accurate prediction of, emotional intensity when making life-changing decisions provides important new evidence that people are better forecasters than previously thought.

People try to anticipate how future outcomes will make them feel in order to make decisions best aligned with their goals. Given that people’s affective forecasts can be mistaken, in Chapter 4 we conducted an experiment to find out what makes them so motivating. Participants reported their forecast, experienced, and remembered emotional response to being denied an opportunity to earn money. We manipulated the importance of this outcome by offering participants a chance to earn either $5 or $100. To assess motivation, we measured how long participants spent time answering survey questions in order to qualify to earn the money. Participants remembered their emotional response to being denied the opportunity to earn money more accurately than they forecast it. Yet, they perceived their forecasts to be more accurate and vivid than their memories. Across conditions, the more important participants perceived the outcome to be, the less accurately they forecast their emotional response, but the more accurate and vivid they perceived their forecasts to be. The vividness of forecasts, not their intensity, actual accuracy, or perceived accuracy, predicted participants’ greater allocation of effort to attain an important outcome than an unimportant outcome. These results highlight the special role that the vividness of forecast emotion plays in motivating behavior to attain important goals.

In summary, these studies reveal how social identity is an underexplored source of bias for affective forecasts, that people are relatively poor at forecasting their feelings about an important outcome, and how emotion forecasts are related to behavior.