Feeling Forward, Looking Back: How Emotion Is Forecast, Lived and Remembered

Start with the planning mistake. George Loewenstein described how a person in a calm, unaroused state underestimates what hunger, pain, fear or arousal will do to their own choices once they are in that state, so a cold-state plan can fail against a hot-state pull.

Here the forecast is about future feelings themselves. In the affective forecasting research of Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson and colleagues, people overestimated both how intense and how long their reactions to events such as a breakup or a promotion would be, partly because they failed to anticipate how quickly they would cope.

Choosing between options side by side exaggerates their differences. Christopher Hsee and Jiao Zhang argued that people compare jointly when they choose but then experience the chosen option on its own, so they over-predict how much a small difference will matter to their satisfaction.

Now the experience has happened and is being judged. Barbara Fredrickson and Daniel Kahneman showed that remembered unpleasantness depends very little on how long an experience lasted and mainly on its most intense moment and its ending, so a gradually tapering discomfort can be remembered as milder even when it was longer.

Time changes what a memory feels like. In diary and recall studies by W. Richard Walker, John Skowronski and Charles Thompson, the emotion attached to unpleasant memories faded faster than the emotion attached to pleasant ones, and the effect is reported to be reduced in people experiencing depression.

This is the same softening with a sharper edge. In discussions of addiction recovery, a person remembers the pleasures of past use while overlooking the harm that came with it, which can make relapse seem like quick relief.

The same tilt can be scaled up from a person to a society. Declinism is the belief that a society or institution is heading toward decline, linked by researchers to rosy retrospection about the past and to the way negative present events are perceived and reported.

Memory also protects our decisions. After a choice, people tend to recall the option they picked as better and the rejected options as worse than their ratings at the time supported, which helps keep confidence in the decision and ease dissonance.

Finish with the reason the story needs defending. In the 1959 study by Elliot Aronson and Judson Mills, people who went through an embarrassing initiation rated a deliberately dull discussion group as more worthwhile, which cognitive dissonance theory explains as revising the value of an outcome upward to match the effort spent.