A Revised Framework for the Investigation of Expectation Update Versus Maintenance in the Context of Expectation Violations: The ViolEx 2.0 Model

Abstract

Expectations are probabilistic beliefs about the future that shape and influence our perception, affect, cognition, and behavior in many contexts. This makes expectations a highly relevant concept across basic and applied psychological disciplines. When expectations are confirmed or violated, individuals can respond by either updating or maintaining their prior expectations in light of the new evidence. Moreover, proactive and reactive behavior can change the probability with which individuals encounter expectation confirmations or violations. The investigation of predictors and mechanisms underlying expectation update and maintenance has been approached from many research perspectives. However, in many instances there has been little exchange between different research fields. To further advance research on expectations and expectation violations, collaborative efforts across different disciplines in psychology, cognitive (neuro)science, and other life sciences are warranted. For fostering and facilitating such efforts, we introduce the ViolEx 2.0 model, a revised framework for interdisciplinary research on cognitive and behavioral mechanisms of expectation update and maintenance in the context of expectation violations. To support different goals and stages in interdisciplinary exchange, the ViolEx 2.0 model features three model levels with varying degrees of specificity in order to address questions about the research synopsis, central concepts, or functional processes and relationships, respectively. The framework can be applied to different research fields and has high potential for guiding collaborative research efforts in expectation research.

Expectation violations, expectation change, and expectation persistence: The scientific landscape as revealed by bibliometric network analyses

“…Expectations can be defined as conditional beliefs about the probabilities of future events, experiences, or information (cf. Hoorens, 2012;Panitz et al, 2021). Expectations vary from (more or less) possible to certain (Roese & Sherman, 2007), they can be more or less explicit (i.e., conscious; , and they may focus on heterogeneous contents (cf.…”

“…Gollwitzer et al, 2018;Rief et al, 2015). In addition, research indicates that expectation violations are of central relevance for many domains of psychology (Pinquart, Endres, et al, 2021;Pinquart, Rothers, et al, 2021), as they very often enable individuals to detect ongoing deviations from internally represented goals (Roese & Sherman, 2007), to adapt goal-directed behavior (Holroyd & Coles, 2002), and to regulate experience in line with situational characteristics (Clark, 2013;Panitz et al, 2021;Pinquart, Endres, et al, 2021), for instance, when actions fail to lead to expected outcomes (cf. Sambrook & Goslin, 2015).…”

“…Furthermore, it has been proposed that one of humans' core motives is to make future expectation violations less probable (Clark, 2013;, as they often evoke aversive emotional states , enhance control demands (Shenhav et al, 2013), and might threaten individuals' self-concept (Brandtstädter & Greve, 1994;Korn et al, 2012;Pinquart & Block, 2020). Previous research (Panitz et al, 2021;Rief et al, 2015) proposes that minimizing future expectation violations can be achieved by adaptively adjusting expectations as a function of the prediction error, leading to updated versions of those expectations that integrate previous and current expectation-disconfirming information. Evidence for this process is provided in situations in which individuals employ performance feedback to proactively recruit control resources and prepare for comparable situations in the future (Bejjani et al, 2020;Cavanagh et al, 2010), but also when the goal-directedness of unfavorable choices is questioned in order to keep maladaptive habits from forming and being maintained (Gillan et al, 2015;McKim et al, 2016).…”

“…Often however, individuals do not update their expectations after they have been violated by situational outcomes (Panitz et al, 2021;Roese & Sherman, 2007). Such expectation maintenance can be advantageous when the outcomes obtained could be disregarded as likely noise (Hohwy, 2017), when avoiding or attenuating negative affect after worse-than-expected experiences , or when expectations need to be robust because they relate to values and positive beliefs that individuals hold about themselves or the world (Pinquart & Block, 2020).…”

“…However, the precise cognitive (Pinquart, Rothers, et al, 2021) and neural (D'Astolfo & Rief, 2017) mechanisms that underlie coping with expectation violations remain controversial. Research on coping with expectation violations has been conducted in several fields of psychology (e.g., general, social, or consumer psychology; Pinquart, Endres, et al, 2021) and with varying theoretical and empirical foci (e.g., neurophysiological processes: D'Astolfo & Rief, 2017; expectation persistence versus change: Panitz et al, 2021; coping with associated negative emotions: . As there is considerable heterogeneity and often little exchange between these different research domains, there is a need to analyze how different approaches interrelate, and which studies have been most influential in the field.…”