Predicted and remembered emotion: tomorrow’s vividness trumps yesterday’s accuracy

Abstract

People rely on predicted and remembered emotion to guide important decisions. But how much can they trust their mental representations of emotion to be accurate, and how much do they trust them? In this investigation, participants (N = 957) reported their predicted, experienced, and remembered emotional response to the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. They also reported how accurate and vivid they perceived their predictions and memories to be, and the importance of the election. Participants remembered their emotional responses more accurately than they predicted them. But, strikingly, they perceived their predictions to be more accurate than their memories. This perception was explained by the greater importance and vividness of anticipated versus remembered experience. We also assessed whether individuals with Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory for personal and public events (N = 33) showed superior ability to predict or remember their emotional responses to events. They did not and, even for this group, predicting emotion was a more intense experience than remembering emotion. These findings reveal asymmetries in the phenomenological experience of predicting and remembering emotion. The vividness of predicted emotion serves as a powerful subjective signal of accuracy even when predictions turn out to be wrong.

Remembering facts versus feelings in the wake of political events

“…Compared to controls, participants with HSAM showed slightly greater consistency in their memory for emotions associated with low control (upset, distress, sadness, grief) and no difference in the consistency of memory for emotions associated with high control (anger, frustration). Levine et al (2020) found that participants with HSAM did not differ from controls in the accuracy with which they remembered their emotional response to Trump's victory in the 2016 U.S. presidential election after three weeks. Because superior memory may only become apparent in people with HSAM after a longer retention interval, and recognition memory for facts concerning public events had not been tested in this group, we examined memory for facts and feelings concerning the 2016 U.S. presidential election after six months.…”

“…Repetition of details via media exposure and rehearsal should promote accuracy in memories of facts but not feelings (Tinti et al, 2014). Consistency over time in participants' feelings and appraisals of political events should promote accuracy in memories of feelings but not facts (Levine et al, 2020). Individuals with HSAM in Study 1 were expected to remember election-related facts, but not their feelings, more accurately than the main group of participants.…”

“…Some variables in this study were included in publications that addressed different research questions. In a study discussed in the introduction, Levine et al (2020) compared the vividness and accuracy of affective forecasts versus memories concerning the 2016 election across 3week intervals. To assess accuracy, this study included the intensity of happiness, anger, and fear experienced days after the election, as well as valence, importance, age, sex, and ethnicity.…”

“…People with HSAM often describe their memories as full of emotion (e.g. Parker et al, 2006), but only two studies have examined memory for emotion in this group (Levine et al, 2020;Patihis et al, 2013). Neither study included a long retention interval, and the findings were mixed.…”

Validity of the Anchor-Item in Estimating the Smallest Subjectively Experienced Difference: Presenting an Anchor-Item Before vs After the Outcome Measure

“…One explanation is that memory for past feelings (i.e., Time 1 scores) doesn't differ very much whether the time between the experience of the feelings and the recall of that experience is one day or two-five days. Most studies on memory for past feelings involve much longer periods between experience and recall (e.g., Kaplan et al, 2016;Levine et al, 2020;Levine et al, 2001;Levine et al, 2012;Ottenstein & Lischetzke, 2020;Safer et al, 2002). Thus, empirically, it's unknown how short a delay is required for memory of past feelings to be relatively more accurate.…”