The Misprediction of Emotions in Track Athletics: Is Experience the Teacher of all Things?

Abstract

People commonly overestimate the intensity of their emotions toward future events. In other words, they display an impact bias. This research addresses the question whether people learn from their experiences and correct for the impact bias. We hypothesize that athletes display an impact bias and, counterintuitively, that increased experience with an event increases this impact bias. A field study in the context of competitive track athletics supported our hypotheses by showing that athletes clearly overestimated their emotions toward the outcome of a track event and that this impact bias was more pronounced for negative events than for positive events. Moreover, with increased athletic experience this impact bias became larger. This effect could not be explained by athletes' forecasted emotions, but it could be explained by the emotions they actually felt following the race. The more experience athletes had with athletics, the less they felt negative emotions after unsuccessful goal attainment. These findings are discussed in relation to possible underlying emotion regulation processes.

Looking into the crystal ball of our emotional lives: emotion regulation and the overestimation of future guilt and shame

“…The present findings support the contention that overestimating the intensity of future emotions can be explained-at least in part-by the misprediction of future emotion regulation (see also, van Dijk et al, 2008;Wilson & Gilbert, 2003, 2005. In other words, people mispredict beforehand how they will cope with emotional events and this bias leads them to overestimate the intensity of future emotions.…”

“…Sometimes people underestimate the intensity of their future emotions, but more often they overestimate their future emotions. Our present findings show-in line with earlier theorizing -that people's intensity bias can be due to their underestimation of the extent to which their emotion regulation processes help them to down-regulate their emotions (van Dijk et al, 2008(van Dijk et al, , 2012Wilson & Gilbert, 2003, 2005. Affective forecasting inaccuracy can be regarded as an error, but ample research has shown that people are "objectively" inaccurate about a range of predictions.…”

“…This can, for example, explain why the intensity bias is typically larger for negative emotions than for positive emotions (e.g. Kermer, Driver-Linn, Wilson, & Gilbert, 2006;van Dijk et al, 2008). Although people are motivated to regulate any emotional event, they are especially motivated to regulate emotion-evoking events that are potentially threatening for their well-being (Wilson & Gilbert, 2003).…”

“…Ample research has shown, however, that people often overestimate the intensity of their future emotions-an intensity bias that has been demonstrated in a wide variety of populations and contexts (see Wilson & Gilbert, 2003, 2005. For example, candidates taking their driver's licence exam overestimated both their disappointment after failing the exam and their happiness after passing it (Finkenauer, Gallucci, van Dijk, & Pollmann, 2007), romantic partners overestimated their unhappiness after the dissolution of their relationship (Gilbert, Pinel, Wilson, Blumberg, & Wheatley, 1998), track athletes overestimated their negative emotions following an unsuccessful race (van Dijk, 2009;van Dijk, Finkenauer, & Pollmann, 2008), and following social exclusion, undergraduates expected to experience greater anger and sadness than they actually did (van Dijk, van Dillen, Seip, & Rotteveel, 2012).…”

“…If people fail to take into account that they often regulate responses to emotion-eliciting events in ways that attenuate their impact, this should result in an overestimation of the emotional intensity of these responses (cf. van Dijk et al, 2008van Dijk et al, , 2012Wilson & Gilbert, 2003, 2005. The main objective of the current study therefore was to examine to what extent people take into account various emotion regulation strategies when predicting their future emotional experiences, and whether failures to accurately assess their influence contribute to people's forecasting biases.…”