Duration Neglect

Duration neglect is the tendency for a person's retrospective judgment of how unpleasant or how painful an experience was to depend only weakly on how long the experience actually lasted, and instead to depend mainly on the most intense moment of the experience and on how the experience felt at its end, a pattern described by the peak-end rule. The psychologists Barbara Fredrickson and Daniel Kahneman established the effect in a 1993 study and showed it holds for pleasant as well as unpleasant experiences, and that an experience whose discomfort tapers off gradually toward the end tends to be remembered as less unpleasant overall than one that ends abruptly at its most intense point, even when the gradually tapering experience actually lasted longer. Duration neglect is treated as a specific instance of the broader category of extension neglect, and it has been applied to research on affective forecasting as well as to practical settings such as the design of medical procedures.