Participants remembered their emotional responses more accurately than they predicted them. But, strikingly, they perceived their predictions to be more accurate than their memories.

Predicted and remembered emotion: tomorrow’s vividness trumps yesterday’s accuracy. Linda J. Levine et al. Memory, Nov 23 2019. https://doi.org/10.1080/09658211.2019.1693598

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.

KEYWORDS: Emotion, prediction, memory, phenomenology, Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory

Excerpts:

Similarities found between predicted and remembered emotion

Emotion predictions and memories were similar in two
notable ways. First, participants both predicted and
remembered the intensity of their feelings about Trump’s
election fairly accurately. Past research has also shown
high accuracy when people predict or remember the intensity
of their feelings about events (e.g., Doré et al., 2016;
Kaplan et al., 2016; Lench et al., 2019; Levine et al., 2012).
Far less accuracy is found when people predict or remember
their general emotional experience, a judgment that
encompasses multiple features of emotion including intensity,
duration, and mood (e.g., Wilson et al., 2000). Second,
participants’ perceptions of the accuracy of their predictions
and memories were strongly related to their vividness
but weakly related to their actual accuracy. The phenomenological
cues of vividness and fluency can render people
poor judges of how much they have learned and will
later remember (Benjamin et al., 1998; Kruger & Dunning,
1999). We found that vividness was not a particularly
reliable guide to the actual accuracy of predicted and
remembered emotion.

Remembered emotion is more trustworthy, predicted emotion is more trusted

Predicted and remembered emotion also differed in important
ways. Participants remembered their emotional
response to Trump’s victory more accurately than they predicted
it. They also perceived their memories to be more
detailed than their predictions. Bringing to mind past
experiences and imagining future ones both involve
drawing from a complex body of knowledge (Conway &
Loveday, 2015). However, imagining future experiences
requires more cognitive acrobatics, including extracting
details from past experiences and flexibly recombining
them into a novel experience (Schacter et al., 2012; Schacter
& Addis, 2007). To simulate how they would feel in the
future if Trump won the election, participants had to piece
together episodic memories of related past experiences
and draw on semantic knowledge and appraisals. In contrast,
episodic detail about their actual emotional response
to Trump’s victory was available to participants after the
election. This likely explains why participants remembered
their emotional experience more accurately than they predicted
it. Despite the greater accuracy of memory than prediction,
the main group of participants perceived their
predictions to be more accurate. They also perceived
their predictions to be more vivid than their memories,
even adjusting for the extremity of emotion predicted
and remembered. Specifically, compared to remembering
their feelings, participants perceived the experience of predicting
their feelings to be more intense, accompanied by a
greater sense of experiencing the event, and easier to bring
to mind.

Why did participants perceive predicted emotion to be
more accurate than remembered emotion when the
reverse was the case? Emotions likely evolved to motivate
action (Miloyan & Suddendorf, 2015). Future events can be
acted on and changed but past events cannot, so people
accommodate to them (Frederick & Loewenstein, 1999;
Wilson & Gilbert, 2008). This inherent asymmetry endows
the future with greater importance than the past (Van
Boven & Caruso, 2015). Extending this view, we proposed
that the greater importance of future emotional experiences
makes predictions particularly vivid, rendering
people vulnerable to misjudging their accuracy. Consistent
with this proposal, participants viewed the outcome of the
2016 presidential election as more important when it was a
future possibility than a past certainty. Greater importance
was associated with perceiving representations of emotion
to be more accurate. Analyses of indirect effects further
showed that the association between greater importance
and perceived accuracy was fully explained by participants’
more vivid phenomenological experience when predicting
than remembering emotion. These findings suggest that
viewing an event as more important before it occurs
than afterwards imbues predicted emotion with greater
vividness than remembered emotion, which in turn is
linked to perceiving emotion predictions to be more accurate
than memories.
Researchers often use the term “vividness” to refer to
the clarity and detail of visual imagery when people
remember past experiences or imagine future ones (e.g.,
D’Argembeau & Van der Linden, 2004; Rubin & Kozin,
1984). Retrospection is typically associated with greater
visual clarity and detail than prospection (e.g., Cole & Berntsen,
2016). However, phenomenological properties other
than detailed imagery contribute to the vividness of
mental representations (Habermas & Diel, 2013; Kensinger,
Addis, & Atapattu, 2011; Van Boven & Ashworth, 2007). For
example, a person’s memory of their recent drive to the
grocery store might be clear and detailed but lackluster.
A person’s memory of their recent near miss on the
freeway might lack clarity and detail but be vivid. Core features
of an experience can come to mind with ease, as if
they were happening in the moment, and accompanied
by intense emotion, even if a representation is not
especially detailed (Kensinger et al., 2011). In the current
investigation, these properties of ease, experiencing, and
intensity, rather than detail, characterised anticipated
emotion more than remembered emotion.

Factors associated with the accuracy of emotion predictions and memories

We also examined two factors that we expected to be
associated with greater accuracy in representations of
emotion. Past research shows that, as episodic memory
for emotion fades, people rely on their current semantic
appraisals of the emotion-eliciting event (e.g., “How good
or bad is this event for my goals?”) to reconstruct how
they must have felt. The more people’s appraisals change
over time, the less accurately they remember how they
felt (e.g., Kaplan et al., 2016; Levine, 1997; Robinson &
Clore, 2002). In the current investigation, greater stability
in participants’ appraisals of whether Trump’s election
was good for the country was associated with greater
accuracy in their memory for how they had felt. Extending
past research, greater stability in appraisals was also associated
with greater accuracy in predicting emotion. These
findings suggest that people draw on their semantic
appraisals of events both to remember how they felt in
the past and to simulate how they will feel in the future.
We also examined whether people with detailed and
accurate episodic memories of autobiographical experiences
were better than others at remembering or predicting
emotional responses to experiences. Individuals with
Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory perform similarly
to controls on many standard cognitive tests (e.g.,
mental imagery, attention; LePort et al., 2017). They also
show similar susceptibility to memory bias when presented
with misleading post-event information (Patihis et al.,
2013). Thus, these individuals do not appear to encode personal
or public events in a unique way but they retain representations
of the events they experienced in greater
detail and for far longer than controls, suggesting unusually
efficient memory consolidation and retrieval
(LePort et al., 2012, 2016, 2017). Emotion is an important
part of autobiographical experience but memory for
emotion had never been tested in this group.
We found that participants with HSAM did not differ
from other participants in the accuracy with which they
predicted or remembered emotion. They also did not
differ from others in the perceived accuracy of emotion
predictions or memories, though they did perceive their
memories to be more detailed. Like the main group, participants
with HSAM found predicting emotion to be a more
intense experience than remembering emotion. Taken
together, these findings highlight differences between
remembering the “what”, “where”, and “when” of events
(Tulving, 2002), which individuals with HSAM do with extraordinary
accuracy and detail, and predicting or remembering
feelings about events. These findings again highlight
the important contribution of semantic appraisals to representation
of emotion. The consistency of semantic
appraisals (e.g., how good or bad is this outcome for my
goals) was associated with greater accuracy in representations
of emotion; having superior episodic memory for
events that may evoke emotion was not. The exceptional
abilities of individuals with HSAM do not appear to
extend to this type of semantic knowledge about the self.
Researchers have speculated that experiencing events
with heightened emotional intensity may be one mechanism
underlying the ability of individuals with HSAM to
retain details of autobiographical and public events
(McGaugh, 2017). However, HSAM participants did not
experience more intense emotion in response to the election
compared to the main group of participants at any
time point. These individuals also remember neutral information
more accurately than controls, such as conversations
about their day during a lab session the previous
week (LePort et al., 2017). Thus, heightened emotional
arousal is not likely to be a primary mechanism underlying
this group’s superior memory for autobiographical events.
In summary, superior memory for personal and public
events did not confer superior ability to predict or remember
emotion. These findings refine our understanding of
the abilities and limitations of a unique group, and
suggest that emotional intensity is not the mechanism
underlying their abilities. The findings also point to important
differences between remembering episodic details of
autobiographical events versus emotions, and underscore
the compelling nature of anticipated emotion.