The history of research on emotion is somewhat unusual. For much of the early and mid-twentieth century, emotion was essentially ignored. Psychologists focused on learning (Chapter 7) and questioned whether emotion was a scientifically useful concept (Duffy, 1934). The problem with studying emotion, they believed, was that it involved unobservable aspects of mind that could not be measured objectively.

Starting in the late 1950s, psychologists began to develop methods for studying the mind (Gardner, 1985). Yet emotion continued to receive little attention. Most psychologists of this era viewed the mind as an information-processing device, similar to a computer. Because computers do not experience emotions, the information-processing approach provided little insight into emotional experience.

Some psychologists bucked these trends. Silvan Tomkins (1962, 1963) developed a theory of emotion that drew on the evolutionary biology of Charles Darwin. Richard Lazarus analyzed ways in which people can control their emotional reactions (Lazarus & Alfert, 1964). But these were minority voices; emotion—a phenomenon central to human experience—received less attention than it deserved.

411

In the last quarter of the twentieth century, the scene shifted. A set of intriguing research findings drew psychologists’ attention to emotion. Investigators found that emotions can directly influence thinking processes. Other researchers identified brain systems that give rise to emotional experience. Research on emotion and culture revealed that some emotions occur in all cultures, whereas others vary across the globe. In total, this diverse set of findings—which you’ll learn about in this chapter—attracted the attention of a generation of researchers. Today, the study of emotions flourishes in psychology (Armony & Vuilleumier, 2013; Lewis, Haviland-Jones, & Barrett, 2008).

In fact, the field has become so large that organizing it is a challenge. We will do so by posing four key questions that today’s researchers seek to answer. The first is “Why do we have emotions?”

Could life exist without emotions? You can imagine it. Science-fiction beings who think and act like you, yet who have no emotions, aren’t hard to picture. But those beings are fictional; human beings lead emotional lives. Why do we have emotions?

Ever since Darwin, scientists have answered this question by looking to our evolutionary past (Nesse & Ellsworth, 2009). Throughout human evolution, emotions must have been advantageous; they must have promoted survival. Let’s consider four psychological activities that have been important throughout human history and that are influenced by emotional states: decision making, motivation, communication, and moral judgment.

412

EMOTION AND DECISION MAKING. Suppose you have to make an important decision. What should be your frame of mind? Many suggest it’s best to decide while in a calm, cold, unemotional state. Entire philosophies have been built around this idea. In ancient Greece and Rome, Stoic philosophers promoted a calm, unemotional lifestyle because they thought emotions impair sound judgment (Solomon, 1993).

Contemporary research contradicts the Stoics. People often make good decisions when they “go with their gut,” that is, when they base decisions on feelings. Research employing the Iowa Gambling Task (Bechara et al., 2005) demonstrates this.

The Iowa Gambling Task is a method for studying the influence of emotions on decision making. Participants play a card game. On each of a long series of trials, they (1) pick a card from one of four decks and (2) win or lose money, depending on the card they picked. Cards from two of the decks turn out to yield consistent but modest winnings. Cards from the other two decks yield larger winnings on many trials but, on occasion, produce very large losses; in the long run, people lose money by picking cards from these decks. While people decide which card to choose, researchers record their nervous-system arousal, to measure emotional reactivity.

The Iowa Gambling Task yields a remarkable finding: Emotions benefit decision making (Bechara et al., 1994). To understand this result, one must distinguish among three types of experimental trials that occur during the task (Table 10.1).

413

The research yields the following results. On early trials, participants are just guessing. They have not yet figured out the task; that is, they cannot say which decks are bad and which are good, and they do not have any intuitions about how best to play. During early trials, they are as likely to choose cards from the bad decks (those that produce occasional large losses) as the good ones (those that produce consistent modest winnings).

On late trials, participants have figured out the task. They can explain, in words, which decks are good and which are bad. They perform well, choosing cards from the good decks.

None of this is surprising. But here’s the key result (Bechara et al., 1997). On middle trials, participants cannot explain in words which decks are bad and which are good; they have not yet played long enough to possess explicit knowledge about which cards to choose. Yet they perform well, choosing cards primarily from the good decks!

How can they have made good decisions without being able to say which decks were good or bad? They relied on their feelings. On the middle trials, whenever participants reached for a card from the bad deck, they tended to experience high levels of physiological arousal; their body’s emotion systems sent a signal indicating that these decks were bad (Damasio, 1994). When they felt this signal, they avoided the bad decks and chose the good ones—before they even knew why they were choosing one deck over another. Their decisions were guided by intuition—an emotional “hunch”—that some decks were better (Bechara et al., 1997). Subsequent studies have confirmed that, by relying on their emotions, people choose good decision strategies even before they can say what those strategies are (Wagar & Dixon, 2006).

Research on patients with brain damage provides additional evidence of how emotion benefits decision making (Damasio, 1994). The brain damage, which affected the brain’s frontal lobes, interfered with patients’ emotional life but not their thinking abilities. Cognitively, the patients were normal, with more than enough intelligence to understand the task. But emotionally, they differed from others; when playing the Iowa Gambling task, the brain-damaged patients experienced no emotional arousal at all, even when losing money. To the Stoic philosopher, they would be ideal decision makers. So how did they do on the task? Terribly! On trial after trial, they chose as many cards from the bad deck as the good deck, and lost money (Bechara et al., 1997).

These results suggest one evolutionary advantage for emotions. If people with normal emotional arousal make good decisions, and brain-damaged patients lacking emotional arousal make poor decisions, then emotion benefits decision making (Figure 10.2).

During middle trials of the Iowa Gambling Task, participants’ performance is unusual. They cannot explain which card decks are good and bad, yet they make good decisions anyway, choosing cards primarily from the good deck. Their emotional arousal guides their decision making.

414

415

Over the course of evolution, emotional experience may have helped organisms survive by fostering quick, intuitive decisions that promoted survival. Much recent research confirms that emotions influence decision making, while also revealing additional brain systems that underpin the relation between feelings and decisions (Wu, Sacchet, & Knutson, 2012). This body of research provides a rich, multilevel understanding of how emotions influence decision making.

EMOTION AND MOTIVATION. Throughout most of human history, survival was a lot of work. People had to hunt and gather food, build shelters, protect themselves from predators, and, once agriculture developed, grow, harvest, and store crops. To do all this, they needed to acquire skills that would enable them to be good hunters and gatherers, builders, and farmers. Where did they get the motivation to learn difficult behaviors and then engage in them, day after day, year after year?

Part of the answer involves thoughts about the future. People understood that if they didn’t work today, there might not be enough food tomorrow. But, as you know from experience, sometimes thinking is not enough. People often think about future plans—to get more exercise, to quit smoking, to save more money—yet procrastinate. Thoughts alone are often insufficient to spur people into action. Here is where emotions help.

Emotions have motivational power (Lazarus, 1991). Anger motivates you to strike out at someone. Disgust motivates you to distance yourself from the disgusting stimulus. Even less intense emotions can motivate action. Consider the emotion of interest.

Interest is an emotion you experience when engaged in a task that, to you, is novel, complex, yet comprehensible (Silvia, 2008). If, for example, you are knowledgeable about modern art, an exhibit of new paintings is interesting; you are intrigued by its novelty and can comprehend its complexity. But if you do not follow modern art, the show might be incomprehensible and thus of no interest to you.

Interest increases motivation. People who experience the emotion of interest when working on a task tend to spend more time on it and need less time to learn its complexities (Sansone & Thoman, 2005). This suggests an evolutionary advantage for the emotion of interest. Throughout human evolution, people who felt interest in activities may have been better at learning skills necessary for survival.

Similarly, other emotions may have been beneficial throughout evolution. Fear motivates people to avoid situations that are threatening, and thus may have helped our evolutionary ancestors to survive by avoiding threats. Guilt motivates people to treat others well and to adhere to social rules (Baumeister, Stillwell, & Heatherton, 1994). This behavior, in turn, could benefit group survival.

EMOTION AND COMMUNICATION. A third function served by emotion is communication. Emotions communicate information. When people are emotionally aroused, you can tell from their looks; their emotional expressions convey information about their psychological state.

A key source of emotional information, as noted above, is the face. Facial expressions can reveal the specific emotion a person is experiencing. Look back at Figure 10.1. You immediately can recognize each emotional state. Every facial expression, in other words, communicates information about emotion.

Darwin (1872) noted two key facts about emotional facial expressions. First, the ability to communicate through facial expression can improve an organism’s chances of survival. Consider, for example, how facial expressions benefit infants. Although babies cannot communicate through language, they can communicate; their facial expressions indicate whether they are content or in need. Conversely, adults, through their facial expressions, can communicate with infants, who recognize smiling and frowning faces by 3 months of age (Barrera & Maurer, 1981). This two-way communication through facial expression enhances infants’ well-being and survival. The ability to communicate through facial expression can also enable organisms to avoid physical conflict. If people are so angry that they feel like hitting someone, their facial expression communicates that anger. “Reading” the expression allows for time to defend oneself.

416

Second, Darwin noted that some human and animal facial expressions are similar. An angry man and an angry dog both lower their eyebrows and bare their teeth (see photos). This implies that the emotions evolved in mammals prior to the evolution of humans and that humans and animals possess essentially the same emotion-generating biology. Emotion, then, is like digestion or respiration: a biological system possessed by all mammals.

You’ve just seen that emotions (1) enable communication and (2) are a product of evolution. Combining these facts yields a fascinating implication: People around the world should be able to communicate with one another through facial expression. Why is that? Human biology is universal; people in all parts of the globe share the same basic biological structures and functions (arms, legs, torso, and head; digestion, respiration, etc.). If evolution gave rise to emotions and emotional expressions, then they should be universal, too. People in different cultures should display similar facial expressions when experiencing the same emotion, as well as recognize emotional expressions displayed by people from other cultures.

In classic research, Ekman and Friesen (1971) tested this idea among members of an isolated group: the Fore people of New Guinea. Individuals in this culture had minimal contact with the outside world; they interacted almost exclusively with members of their own culture and had never seen a movie or TV show. Thus, they could not have learned, though social experience, how Westerners display emotions on their faces. Ekman and Friesen showed Fore individuals photographs of people of Western culture posing facial expressions of happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, disgust, and fear. Could the Fore recognize these emotions?

417

If facial expressions are like words—learned in one’s own culture and variable across hundreds of languages around the world—then they wouldn’t be able to. But it turned out that they could! Despite having no contact with Westerners, the Fore identified accurately—sometimes with perfect accuracy—facial expressions posed in the West (Ekman & Friesen, 1971). Conversely, when Fore individuals were asked to pose facial expressions of emotion, Westerners could recognize them with similar accuracy (Ekman, 1993; Figure 10.3).

Biological research on the anatomy of facial muscles likewise suggests that facial expressions are universal. A specific set of muscles produces facial expressions of emotion. Anatomical studies show that there is little person-to-person variation in these facial muscles (Waller, Cray, & Burrows, 2008). Facial muscles are therefore a universal biological mechanism enabling all people to communicate emotions to one another.

In addition to expressing your feelings, facial expressions can influence the emotion that you feel. Research findings support the facial feedback hypothesis, which is the prediction that biological feedback from facial muscles directly influences emotional experience. To test the hypothesis, experimenters ask participants to perform simple tasks that move their facial muscles into positions that correspond to positive or negative emotions. They then measure people’s emotional state. When participants are asked, for example, to hold a pencil in their teeth—an action that moves facial muscles into the shape of a smile—their emotional experience becomes more positive. When they are asked to move their eyebrows down and closer to one another—a movement that is part of the facial expression of sadness—their emotions become more negative (McIntosh, 1996).

418

Other tests of the facial feedback hypothesis involve Botox, a cosmetic treatment that reduces wrinkles by lowering the activity of facial muscles. Two Botox-based findings support the hypothesis:

Although biological factors contribute strongly to facial expressions, culture plays a role, too. The exact facial signals that people use to infer others’ emotional states vary across cultures. Evidence of this comes from a study using digitized photos in which facial features in areas around the eyes, mouth, and eyebrows were systematically manipulated (Jack, Caldara, & Schyns, 2012). Researchers asked both Western Caucasian and East Asian participants to view the photos and judge the emotion each displayed. Through a statistical analysis, they then identified the facial features to which participants paid greatest attention. These features differed across cultures. Western Caucasians concentrated on the eyebrows and mouth when making judgments about emotion. People in East Asia paid more attention to direction of gaze, that is, where the person in the photo was looking (down, up, left, or right). The exact reason for the cultural difference is not known, but it may reflect differences in the way people express, as opposed to hide, their feelings in different cultures (Jack et al., 2012). Whatever the exact cause, the results argue against the notion that evolved biological factors completely determine the “language” of emotional expression.

Facial expression is not the only way people communicate emotions. Another is nonverbal vocalizations, that is, sounds that do not involve words. In the United States, people cheer when celebrating, growl when angry, laugh when amused, and scream when afraid. Do people in other cultures make these same sounds while expressing these emotions? To find out, researchers (Sauter et al., 2010) obtained recordings of these various sounds (people cheering, growling, etc.) among members of two cultures: one European and one African—specifically, an isolated subculture in the southern African nation of Namibia. In this Namibian culture, individuals receive no formal education and have no contact with members of Western culture, which makes them a particularly interesting point of comparison.

419

The researchers read stories with a variety of emotional content to people in both cultures, played for them sounds of emotion recorded in the other culture (i.e., Namibians heard the sounds made by Europeans and vice versa), and asked participants to match sounds to emotions. The responses of participants from both cultures were highly accurate (Sauter et al., 2010). For example, despite having no contact with Westerners, Namibians could recognize what Europeans sound like when angry, sad, and fearful. The results suggest that emotional vocalizations, just like emotional facial expressions, are substantially based in evolved biology. They are not learned “from scratch,” but instead reflect an inherited system for communicating emotional states to others.

RESEARCH TOOLKIT

In sum, a wealth of research suggests that a third function served by emotion across the history of our species is communication of feelings and intentions. A fourth function concerns moral judgment.

EMOTION AND MORAL JUDGMENT. Moral judgments are decisions that involve fundamental questions of right and wrong. Compared with other judgments, moral judgments are ones in which you are certain that your belief is absolutely right and you cannot be convinced otherwise (Skitka, 2010). Suppose you hear in the news that someone in a supermarket line knocked a few other shoppers unconscious so he could check out more quickly. Is that OK? Of course not; it’s immoral, you’re sure of it, and could not be convinced otherwise.

How do people make moral judgments? Sometimes they rely on thinking—reasoning about social situations and the correctness of actions (Aquino et al., 2009; Kohlberg, 1969). Other times, though, they rely on emotions. Even when people can’t think of any specific reason why a behavior is or is not morally accepted, they still are certain of their moral judgments. Emotions fuel intuitions about what is right and wrong (Haidt, 2001).

421

Research by Jonathon Haidt (2001) shows how emotion contributes to moral judgment. Participants read about hypothetical behaviors that (1) cause no harm to anyone, yet (2) feel morally wrong (e.g., eating a dead pet dog, or a brother and sister having sex). Participants were certain these behaviors are wrong. Yet they couldn’t say why. Haidt found that, when trying to explain their judgments in such situations, people are “morally dumbfounded…. [They] stutter, laugh, and express surprise at their inability to find supporting reasons” (Haidt, 2001, p. 817). These moral judgments are explained by emotional reactions; people experience the emotion of disgust when thinking about such behaviors and thus judge them to be immoral.

TRY THIS!

The experience of moral dumbfounding should be familiar to you; it is the experience you likely had when completing this chapter’s Try This! activity. The second Try This! research task you worked on was used in the brain research on emotion and moral judgment that we will review now.

Brain research confirms that emotions contribute to moral judgment. In one study, brain images were taken as participants made judgments about different behaviors, some of which violated moral rules (Greene et al., 2001). When people were making moral judgments, regions of the brain involved in emotional experience were particularly active.

422

Again, the findings suggest that emotion was beneficial evolutionarily. Consider the case of sexual relations among siblings. During human evolution, such relations would have been very bad for survival; inbreeding increases the chances of birth defects, among other survival risks. The emotional reaction of disgust prevents the behavior and thus enhances survival of the species (Hauser, 2006).

So far in this chapter, we’ve discussed universals. All people, in all cultures, experience emotions that influence their decision making, motivation, communication, and moral judgment. But universals are not the whole story of emotion. When it comes to emotional life, people can differ.

People confronting the same event can experience markedly different emotions. For instance, if two students get a D on a chemistry exam, one might be sad but the other anxious. If you tell a joke about lawyers to two people, one might be amused but the other angry. Why do people’s emotions differ?

THE PERSONAL MEANING OF EVENTS. Environmental events, by themselves, do not produce emotions. Emotions result from the meaning that people give to events. The personal significance of an event—what the event means to an individual—is the immediate cause of his or her emotion. If a low exam score means “My parents will kill me,” a student will feel anxious. If it means “I can’t reach my professional dreams,” she will feel sad (Higgins, 1987). If someone listening to your lawyer joke is thinking, “Hey, my mom’s a lawyer; that’s an insult!” then he will feel angry.

Individual differences in emotional experience therefore reflect the power of thinking. Thoughts shape emotional experience. When people’s thoughts vary, emotional experiences vary, too (Lazarus, 1991; Scherer, Schorr, & Johnstone, 2001).

Thoughts so powerfully shape emotions that people can have a wide range of emotional reactions while merely sitting around by themselves. Even if nothing changes in the outer environment, changes within the mind can alter our emotional state (Nowak & Vallacher, 1998). Novelists capture this circumstance vividly. Consider the emotional life of a character created by Russian writer Leo Tolstoy. He begins in happy reverie, dreaming of the joys of married life as he sits in a hotel room just prior to his wedding. But then, look what happens:

423

Happiness is only in loving and wishing her wishes, thinking her thoughts…that’s happiness.

“But do I know her ideas, her wishes, her feelings?” some voice suddenly whispered to him. The smile died away from his face, and he grew thoughtful. And suddenly a strange feeling came upon him. There came over him a dread and doubt—doubt of everything. “What if she does not love me? What if she’s marrying me simply to be married?”…And strange, most evil thoughts of her began to come to him. He was jealous of [another man]…He suspected she had not told him everything.

He jumped up quickly…with despair in his heart and bitter anger against all men, against himself, against her.

—Tolstoy (Anna Karenina, 1886, p. 451)

His shifting thoughts about a highly meaningful event—his upcoming marriage—jolt him from one emotion to another and another, all in a matter of seconds.

APPRAISING EVENTS. The examples above have something in common. The thoughts that produce emotions are ideas about the relation between an event (the grade, the joke, a fiancée’s feelings) and the self. “My parents will kill me”; “My mom’s a lawyer”; “What if she does not love me?”

People react emotionally to events that they see as relevant to their own well-being (Lazarus, 1991). If someone says, “That’s a great outfit you’re wearing,” you feel happy because the comment reflects on you (your appearance and your good taste in clothes). If someone watching TV says, “That’s a great outfit Angelina Jolie is wearing,” the statement has little emotional impact because it is not significant to your own self-concept (unless you are a huge Angelina Jolie fan). You experience emotions when you judge that an event is significant to your desires, goals, well-being, obligations, and individual rights.

Psychologists call these judgments appraisals. Appraisals are evaluations of the personal significance of ongoing and upcoming events (Ellsworth & Scherer, 2003; Lazarus, 1991; Moors, 2007).

APPRAISAL THEORIES OF EMOTION. According to appraisal theories of emotion, people continuously monitor the relation between themselves and the world around them. They pay attention to, and try to determine the meaning of, daily events from the large (a long, serious discussion) to the small (a quick, ambiguous glance). Appraisal theories of emotion explain that this process of making sense of events—appraising them—determines the emotion people experience.

The psychologist Richard Lazarus identified a small number of appraisals that can generate a wide variety of emotional experiences (Lazarus, 1991; Smith & Lazarus, 1990). In his appraisal theory of emotion, key appraisals include the following:

A simple example shows how these appraisals shape your emotions. Suppose your relationship partner tells you it’s “not working out” (Figure 10.6). You could experience any of a number of different emotions when hearing the news. The exact emotion you experience will be determined by your appraisals—the thoughts that quickly run through your head at the time. If you think, “It’s his fault that this didn’t work,” you’ll tend to feel angry. If you think, “I’m incapable of ever being in a relationship that works out,” you’ll tend to feel sad or depressed. Research shows that individual differences in the appraisals people make predict the emotions they experience (Kuppens, Van Mechelen, & Rijmen, 2008).

Thus, there is a lot of thinking behind emotions. Without thoughts like “I’m to blame” or “Things might improve,” you wouldn’t experience emotions such as guilt or hope.

Despite all this thinking, emotions happen quickly (Barrett, Ochsner, & Gross, 2007). You can experience complex emotional reactions “in the blink of an eye” because your thinking is fast, too; people appraise events automatically, in a fraction of a second (Moors & De Houwer, 2001). If a boyfriend calls to say a relationship isn’t working, multiple thoughts—“He’s a jerk,” “I’m a loser,” “I’ll never have to see him again”—rapidly come to mind.

425

CULTURAL OPPORTUNITIES

426

Emotions sometimes seem unmanageable. Tragedies cause grief that can seem over-whelming. Insults can create anger that seems out of control. Can people control these emotional reactions?

CONTROLLING EMOTION BY CHANGING APPRAISALS. Appraisal theories suggest that they can. Because appraisals—people’s thoughts about events—shape emotion, people can control emotions by changing their thinking.

One way to change your thinking is to alter anticipatory appraisals, which are thoughts that people have prior to the occurrence of an event. If, before a trip to the dentist, you tell yourself, “This visit is going to be terrible!” then your thought is an anticipatory appraisal.

In one experiment on anticipatory appraisals, researchers (Lazarus & Alfert, 1964) manipulated appraisals prior to a film depicting a potentially emotionally arousing event: a ritual surgical procedure conducted on boys in a non-Western, nonindustrialized culture. In one condition, participants were told that the film depicted a positive, joyful cultural experience. In another condition, participants viewed the film with no prior appraisal-related instructions. Physiological measures of emotional arousal taken during the film showed that participants who watched the film with no prior instructions became highly emotionally aroused; for them, the film was disturbing. Participants who first heard the appraisal information were much less emotionally aroused despite seeing exactly the same film (Lazarus & Alfert, 1964; Figure 10.8).

Through anticipatory appraisals, people also can gain control over impulsive emotions, specifically, impulsive desires to engage in a behavior that they are supposed to avoid. In research on delay of gratification (Chapter 13), children are asked not to eat a food treat that’s set before them, such as a marshmallow. Most kids can’t avoid it; they eat the treat even when instructed not to. However, children who are taught anticipatory appraisals—for example, to think of the marshmallow as a ball they can play with rather than a food—are able to refrain from eating it (Mischel, 1974). The anticipatory appraisals directly reduce children’s level of impulsive emotional arousal (Metcalfe & Mischel, 1999).

427

SUPPRESSING SIGNS OF EMOTION. Sometimes it’s too late for anticipatory appraisals. You’re already emotional: angry, sad, fearful, disgusted. What can you do if you want to hide these emotions from others—to remain “cool as a cucumber” or to “keep a stiff upper lip”?

If you’re already emotionally aroused and don’t want it to show, you need to suppress your emotion. Emotion suppression is any conscious, intentional effort to prevent yourself from showing any visible sign of emotional arousal (Gross, 1998). If you are upset but try not to mention your feelings to others or let them show on your face, then you are engaged in emotion suppression.

A primary question about emotion suppression is its effects: Does suppressing an emotion reduce a person’s emotional arousal? Or, does trying to appear calm “backfire,” intensifying the emotional state instead? To find out, a researcher gave different instructions to three groups of participants prior to their viewing an emotionally stressful film (it depicted the medical amputation of a limb). In one condition, participants received anticipatory appraisal instructions similar to those in research discussed above; they were asked to appraise the film in a scientific manner, remaining emotionally detached while focusing on technical details of the surgery. In a second condition, participants received thought-suppression instructions; they were told that if they felt emotionally upset during the film, they should “try not to let those feelings show…. Try to behave in such a way that a person watching you would not know you were feeling anything” (Gross, 1998, pp. 227–228). Finally, a control group was provided neither instruction. The dependent variables included physiological measures of emotional arousal (heart rate, autonomic nervous system activity) during the film.

The two strategies for controlling emotion—anticipatory appraisal and suppression—had different effects. Anticipatory appraisal worked. People who focused on the film’s technical details were less aroused than others. Thought suppression backfired, at least when it came to physiological arousal. People who tried to suppress outer signs of emotion were more aroused than participants in the other two groups (Gross, 1998). Subsequent studies confirm these results; efforts at suppressing emotion often increase, rather than decrease, emotional arousal (Roberts, Levenson, & Gross, 2008).

Other research links emotion suppression to a behavior many of us try to avoid: overeating (Butler, Young, & Randall, 2010). Every day for a week, people in heterosexual relationships indicated whether they (1) kept their emotions to themselves, rather than revealing them to their partner, and (2) ate more, less, or the same as usual amount that day. Among women who were overweight, but not among those who were underweight, thought suppression predicted overeating; on days when they suppressed their emotions, overweight women ate more than usual. Suppressing signs of emotion may have increased women’s negative emotional experience and prompted them to eat more as a way of coping with their negative feelings.

428

PREDICTING YOUR EMOTIONS. Controlling emotions, as you’ve just seen, is difficult. Once an emotion starts up, efforts to suppress it can backfire. Let’s now consider something that seems like it should be easier: not controlling, but merely predicting your own emotional state.

How do you predict you would feel if you lost weight, started a new relationship, or won a lot of money? Or if you gained weight, experienced a breakup, or lost a lot of money? People usually predict that such events will have a big impact on their emotional life—but their predictions commonly are wrong. When predicting emotions, people make a systematic error: They overestimate the impact of life events on emotions. Good and bad events usually have less effect than people expect. In general, people often are poor at affective forecasting, that is, predicting the degree, and duration, of their emotional (or “affective”) reactions to events (Wilson & Gilbert, 2003).

In one study (Wilson et al., 2000; Study 3), psychologists asked college football fans how happy they would be in the days following a big game if their team won. For each of a few days following the game (which the team did, in fact, win), these same participants completed a survey indicating how happy they actually were feeling. Fans overestimated the emotional impact of the win. The good news of the team’s victory had less strong and less long-lasting effects on emotion than fans had predicted.

Overestimation is common. When predicting the effects of events—electoral outcomes, results of medical tests, interactions with friends and romantic partners, increases in personal wealth—on their emotions, people commonly overestimate (Kahneman et al., 2006; Wilson & Gilbert, 2003). They anticipate that bad events will be emotionally worse and good events more emotionally uplifting than they actually turn out to be (Figure 10.9).

These findings seem disheartening, implying that you can’t do much to change your emotions. You might predict that you’ll be happier if you break up with your current dating partner, transfer to a new school, or get a higher-paying job. But your prediction could be wrong. Some psychologists have suggested that people’s sense of well-being—their overall happiness or unhappiness with their life—can’t be changed. Your level of happiness, they suggest, is a stable personality trait; if something good happens in your life, you might feel better for a day or two, but then you quickly return to your typical emotional level (Lykken & Tellegen, 1996). Recent results, however, have shed new light on the question of life events and happiness (see This Just In).

429

THIS JUST IN