Biden or Trump? Working memory for emotion predicts the ability to forecast future feelings.

Abstract

Affective forecasting-the ability to predict how different outcomes will make us feel-is a crucial aspect of making optimal decisions. Recent laboratory evidence suggests that working memory for emotion is a basic psychological mechanism underlying forecasting ability: Individual differences in affective working memory predict how accurately people can forecast their future feelings whereas measures of "cognitive" working memory do not. Here, we demonstrate that this selective relationship between affective forecasting and affective working memory generalizes to forecasted feelings about a major real-world event. We report results from a preregistered (online) study (N = 76) demonstrating that affective working memory performance predicted how accurately people anticipate their feelings about the outcome of the 2020 U.S. presidential election. This relationship was specific to affective working memory and was also demonstrated in a description-based forecasting measure with emotionally evocative photographs, replicating previous results. However, neither affective nor cognitive working memory was related to a novel event-based forecasting questionnaire, adapted to compare predicted and experienced feelings to everyday events. Together, these findings advance a mechanistic understanding of affective forecasting and underscore the potential importance of affective working memory in some forms of higher order emotional thought. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).