How Anticipated Emotions Guide Self-Control Judgments.

Hiroki P Kotabe,Francesca Righetti,Wilhelm Hofmann

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01614

Hiroki P Kotabe, Francesca Righetti + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01614

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Abstract

When considering whether to enact or not to enact a tempting option, people often anticipate how their choices will make them feel, typically resulting in a “mixed bag” of conflicting emotions. Building on earlier work, we propose an integrative theoretical model of this judgment process and empirically test its main propositions using a novel procedure to capture and integrate both the intensity and duration of anticipated emotions. We identify and theoretically integrate four highly relevant key emotions, pleasure, frustration, guilt, and pride. Whereas the former two (basic hedonic) emotions are anticipated to dissipate relatively quickly, the latter two (self-conscious) emotions are anticipated to be more long-lived. Regarding the relative weighting of emotions, we obtained evidence for a relative guilt bias and pride neglect under default conditions. Furthermore, we identify situational influences on this judgment process and find that rendering self-conscious emotions more situationally salient positively impacts self-control decision-making. We discuss how these findings build on an integrative theory of self-control and how they are useful for the design of choice environments and interventions.

Highlights

People’s choices are often guided by the feelings they anticipate
We propose a model of how anticipated emotions guide self-control judgments in reflective self-control situations and we report four studies testing its main propositions by addressing the following interrelated questions: (1) What are the primary emotions anticipated? (2) How do the anticipated intensities and durations of these emotions compare with each other? (3) To what degree are each of these anticipated emotions weighted into self-control judgments? we address questions regarding how contextual factors influence the process, including (4) the effects of increasing the situational salience of basic hedonic emotions vs. self-conscious emotions involved in self-control?
The number of votes for “other negative emotions” significantly differed by scenario, B = −1.16, Wald χ2 = 5.68, p = 0.017, 95% CI [−2.11, −0.21], OR = 3.19, but the number of votes for “other positive emotions” did not – overall, there were far fewer votes for the “other” categories (16 total vs. 386 total for the self-control emotions), so we do not interpret these results further

Summary

Introduction

People’s choices are often guided by the feelings they anticipate. In a simple situation, the anticipation of positive affect may guide approach whereas the anticipation of negative affect may guide avoidance. In situations involving self-control dilemmas, choices present people with possible futures involving mixed and conflicting emotional experiences (Hofmann et al, 2013). A dieter may anticipate that the experience of eating a medium-rare steak for dinner will involve some positive affect but the experience of breaking their diet will involve some negative affect. This hungry dieter may anticipate that the experience of forgoing the medium-rare steak will involve some negative affect but the experience of sticking to their diet will involve some positive affect. What can be seen in this example is that self-control does involve a dilemma between “being good” or “being bad,” but it can involve the anticipation of mixed-emotional dilemmas of the possibility of feeling good and bad from being good or bad (Giner-Sorolla, 2001; Berrios et al, 2015)

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