The role of affective expectations in subjective experience and decision-making

Two studies explored the extent to which prior affective expectations shape people's evaluations of experiences and decisions about repeating those experi-ences. Study 1 found that students ' prior expectations about an upcoming vacation accounted for a significant portion of the variance in their post-vacation evalu-ations, as did students ' recall of specific experiences. In Study 2, both prior expectations and actual experiences of watching a movie were manipulated in a 2 x 2 design. People's affective expectations made more of a difference than the objective experience when assessing people's willingness to participate in the study again. A reinterpretation hypothesis-that people discount or reweigh memories of expectation-inconsistent events-accounted for the results of these studies better than a selective memory or initial effects hypothesis. Jared Diamond, the author and physiologist, frequently travels to New Guinea to study its birds. On a recent trip he was finally able to visit an extremely remote area, the Lakes Plain. Because he had always wanted to visit this part of New Guinea, Diamond expected to experience tremendous enjoyment and fulfillment at finally being able to do so. His experiences, however, were soon at great odds with his expectations: The weather was so hot and humid that I felt myself overheating wi th every step. I longed to go shirtless for comfort but didn't dare because of the clouds of mosquitoes. Spiders were crawling through my hair, stinging ants had gotten inside m y underwear, and the itching of chigger bites on my private parts was The research described in this article was supported by National Institute of Mental Health Grant MH41841 to the third author. A previous version of this research was presented at the May, 1993 meeting of the Midwestern Psychological Association by the second author. We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for very helpful comments and sugges