Abstract
Memory forms the input for future behavior. Therefore, how individuals remember a certain experience may be just as important as the experience itself. The peak-and-end-rule (PE-rule) postulates that remembered experiences are best predicted by the peak emotional valence and the emotional valence at the end of an experience in the here and now. The PE-rule, however, has mostly been assessed in experimental paradigms that induce relatively simple, one-dimensional experiences (e.g., experienced pain in a clinical setting). This hampers generalizations of the PE-rule to the experiences in everyday life. This paper evaluates the generalizability of the PE-rule to more complex and heterogeneous experiences by examining the PE-rule in a virtual reality (VR) experience, as VR combines improved ecological validity with rigorous experimental control. Findings indicate that for more complex and heterogeneous experiences, peak and end emotional valence are inferior to other measures (such as averaged valence and arousal ratings over the entire experiential episode) in predicting remembered experience. These findings suggest that the PE-rule cannot be generalized to ecologically more valid experiential episodes.
Highlights
According to Kahneman and Riis (2005), the only thing that we keep from our experiences are the memories of those experiences
As we argue, most of these studies have employed very specific experimental paradigms that induce homogeneous and quite unidimensional experiences. This limitation of existing studies questions the generalizability of the PE-rule to the more complex and heterogeneous experiences that make up everyday life. We address this issue by assessing the predictive power of the PE-rule in a virtual reality (VR) experience, since VR has been proposed as an excellent way to combine acceptable levels of ecological validity with rigorous experimental control in lab environments (Diemer et al, 2015; Parsons, 2015)
Results indicate that immediately remembered overall valence and arousal are best predicted by peak emotional valence and by average emotional arousal, while remembered overall valence and arousal after 1 week are best predicted by average emotional valence and average emotional arousal
Summary
According to Kahneman and Riis (2005), the only thing that we keep from our experiences are the memories of those experiences. A major finding has been that emotions play an important role in shaping the memory of an experience. Compared to non-emotional experiences, experiential episodes that include emotions are remembered more vividly and in more detail (Kensinger, 2004, 2009; Kensinger and Schacter, 2008). The emotions that are experienced during a certain episode are crucial in determining whether an individual will either repeat or avoid such similar activities and events in the future (Kahneman et al, 1997). How individuals remember the emotions from their experiences may be just as important as the experienced emotions themselves in guiding subsequent behavior
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