Neuroticism and Extraversion Magnify Discrepancies Between Retrospective and Concurrent Affect Reports

Abstract

This study is the first to identify arousal-specific retrospective affect report discrepancies over time and suggests retrospective reports also reflect personality differences in affective self-knowledge.

Dispositional negativity in the wild: Social environment governs momentary emotional experience.

“…Because EMA data are captured in the real world, in real time (e.g., who are you with? ), they circumvent the biases that distort retrospective reports, such as end-of-day diary entries, and can provide insights into how experience dynamically responds to changes in context (Supplementary Figure S1 and Supplementary Table 1) (Barrett, 1997; Lay, Gerstorf, Scott, Pauly, & Hoppmann, in press; Stone, Shiffman, Atienza, & Nebeling, 2007). Subjects were selectively recruited from a much larger pool of previously screened individuals ( n =2,501; Figure 1a), which enabled us to characterize relations between a broad spectrum of dispositional negativity (Figure 1b) and fluctuations in momentary experience across different real-world contexts for the first time.…”

Recalling Experiences: Looking at Momentary, Retrospective and Global Assessments of Relationship Satisfaction

“…A third goal of the current study concerned the exploration of possible moderators of a general mean-level bias. Regarding the retrospection of affective experiences, various moderators were identified in previous research, like personality (Feldman Lay, Gerstorf, Scott, Pauly, & Hoppmann, 2017;Mill, Realo, & Allik, 2016), coping style (Schimmack & Hartmann, 1997), subjective well-being (Diener, Larsen, & Emmons, 1984), gender (Robinson, Johnson, & Shields, 1998), self-esteem (Christensen, Wood, & Feldman Barrett, 2003) or daily tiredness and age (Mill et al, 2016;Neubauer et al, 2019). The accessibility model of Robinson and Clore (2002a) suggests different sources of information individuals use when they report on their emotions.…”

“…Momentary reports of individuals' emotions are described to be mainly driven by the experiential knowledge in the emotional situation, whereas retrospective reports shift from relying on accessible, episodic memory in shortterm retrospection to relying on semantic memory and thereby to stable situation-specific or identity-related beliefs and heuristics in long-term retrospection (see Conner & Feldman Barrett, 2012 for a related account). This would explain why individual characteristics were found to moderate mean-level bias, when these are associated with beliefs about one's experiences and behavior in general (e.g., enhanced levels of remembered negative affect for individuals high in neuroticism, see Feldman Lay et al, 2017;Mill et al, 2016).…”

“…Averages of states that are more proximal to the time of retrospection provide in our study an incremental effect for positively framed items. All of these incremental effects may have a functional basis, and may cause a single retrospective assessment to be especially influenced by salient events (see also Lay et al, 2017).…”

“…Negative information dominate positive ones in various domains (see Baumeister et al, 2001;Vaish et al, 2008 for reviews). Lay et al (2017) argue that the arousal that accompanies an affective reaction is an important factor for the relevance of an experience. Following these ideas, individuals might remember instances of them having been annoyed more profoundly, because these situations were accompanied with negative and aroused affect, in contrast to the average positive, not especially aroused daily relationship mood and need satisfaction in healthy relationships.…”