Anxiety sensitivity, a trait characterized by fear of anxiety-related body sensations, has been linked to heightened attention to pain, appraising body sensations as threatening, and remembering threat-related information. We assessed whether individuals with greater anxiety sensitivity overestimate in remembering pain. We also assessed whether emotion regulation strategies that direct attention away from pain (distraction) or appraisals of pain (reappraisal) would alleviate memory bias. Participants (N = 125) completed a measure of anxiety sensitivity. They were randomly assigned to one of two emotion regulation conditions (distraction, reappraisal) or to a control condition prior to taking part in a cold pressor task. They rated the intensity of pain during and immediately after the task. Memory for pain was assessed 3 to 7 days later. Greater anxiety sensitivity was associated with an increase in threat-related appraisals over time and with remembering pain as having been more intense than originally reported. Engaging in reappraisal mitigated this memory bias but engaging in distraction did not. These findings suggest that health-care practitioners can encourage reappraisal to promote more positive memories of procedural pain, particularly in highly anxious patients, who tend to misremember pain experiences as worse than experienced.

Forecast and remembered emotion play an important role in people’s decisions and may influence their personal happiness and well-being. Chapter 1 provides an overview of this three-part dissertation. Across five studies, we investigated how affective forecasts are influenced by social aspirations, shape people’s decisions, and motivate goal-directed action. In Chapter 2, we demonstrate that religion, an aspirational source of social identity, predicts people's beliefs about how they should feel in the wake of a negative life event. In two studies, more religious participants reported greater satisfaction with life and forecast that they would feel less unhappiness about a negative outcome – a poor exam grade. Yet religiosity was not associated with experiencing less unhappiness following a negative outcome, even when participants’ religious identity was primed. The association between religiosity and life satisfaction was fully mediated by self-enhancement. These findings suggest that reports of life satisfaction and effective coping among religious people stem partly from their expectations about how they should feel, rather than from how they actually do feel, following negative events. In Chapter 3, we compared forecasts of emotional intensity, frequency, and duration. We assessed which of these features of their future emotional experience people forecast in order to make important life decisions. We also evaluated whether the features of forecast emotion that people relied on more when making decisions were the ones they forecast more accurately. In Study 1, undergraduates reported relying more on forecast emotional intensity than frequency or duration to decide which colleges to apply to. In Study 2, a three-part longitudinal study, fourth year medical students reported relying more on forecast emotional intensity than frequency or duration to decide how to rank residency programs in preparation for being matched with a program. Medical students were also most accurate when forecasting the intensity of their emotional response to matching with their program. Further, more accurate forecasts of emotional intensity were associated with positive outcomes, including being matched with a more favored residency program and being more satisfied with that program. Greater reliance on, and more accurate prediction of, emotional intensity when making life-changing decisions provides important new evidence that people are better forecasters than previously thought.

People try to anticipate how future outcomes will make them feel in order to make decisions best aligned with their goals. Given that people’s affective forecasts can be mistaken, in Chapter 4 we conducted an experiment to find out what makes them so motivating. Participants reported their forecast, experienced, and remembered emotional response to being denied an opportunity to earn money. We manipulated the importance of this outcome by offering participants a chance to earn either $5 or $100. To assess motivation, we measured how long participants spent time answering survey questions in order to qualify to earn the money. Participants remembered their emotional response to being denied the opportunity to earn money more accurately than they forecast it. Yet, they perceived their forecasts to be more accurate and vivid than their memories. Across conditions, the more important participants perceived the outcome to be, the less accurately they forecast their emotional response, but the more accurate and vivid they perceived their forecasts to be. The vividness of forecasts, not their intensity, actual accuracy, or perceived accuracy, predicted participants’ greater allocation of effort to attain an important outcome than an unimportant outcome. These results highlight the special role that the vividness of forecast emotion plays in motivating behavior to attain important goals.

In summary, these studies reveal how social identity is an underexplored source of bias for affective forecasts, that people are relatively poor at forecasting their feelings about an important outcome, and how emotion forecasts are related to behavior.

This dissertation assessed the extent to which people endorse theories that emotion helps versus hinders reasoning and wellbeing and how these theories relate to analytical reasoning, physical health, emotion regulation and wellbeing. Study 1 examined the links between help and hinder theories, reasoning under stress, reappraisal and suppression use, and wellbeing. Help theory endorsement predicted better reasoning, more reappraisal and greater wellbeing, while hinder theory endorsement predicted more sick days in recent months and more suppression. In Study 2, a new measure of help and hinder theories (The Help and Hinder Theories Scale; HHTE) was developed which assessed the set of beliefs that form each theory. Study 3 demonstrated that the HHTE’s factor structure replicated in a separate sample, and that the scale had adequate three-week test-retest reliability. Study 3 also showed evidence of convergent and divergent validity for the HHTE. Study 4 then tested causal relations between help and hinder theories and responses to a distressing event. Specifically, participants who were randomly assigned to a condition to encourage a help theory endorsed a help theory more and endorsed a hinder theory less than those in the control condition. Participants in the help theory condition reported more emotion acceptance of their emotional response to viewing a distressing film clip, and showed faster emotional and physiological recovery. Together, these studies suggest that believing that emotion is helpful matters for emotional wellbeing and social relationships, and may motivate people to accept emotional experience and thus show faster physiological recovery after distressing events. In contrast, believing that emotion is a hindrance is linked to lower wellbeing, less social support, and less-effective emotion regulation strategies.

Life is full of triumphs and defeats. When people experience positive life events, they often share the news, allowing them to savor and capitalize on their good fortune. Sharing positive life experiences with others has been shown to increase the intensity of positive emotion (Gable & Reis, 2010). However, research has yet to address several important questions about the benefits of social sharing and the processes that produce them. Namely, does social sharing increase the duration of positive emotion as well as its intensity? What types of responses from listeners serve to increase positive emotion?

The first aim of this dissertation was to investigate whether sharing increases the duration of positive emotion. The second aim of this project was to uncover processes by which sharing increases positive emotion, an issue that has received little empirical attention (Gable, Reis, Impett, & Asher, 2004). I hypothesized that sharing sustains positive emotion because enthusiastic responses lead to an increase in the sharer’s appraisal of the importance of the event. I also hypothesized that enthusiastic responses may sustain positive emotion because they emphasize remarkable and unique aspects of the emotion-eliciting event. Emphasizing such features may slow the sharer’s tendency to “explain away” positive events and the resulting decrease in emotional response.

Two studies tested these hypotheses. Study 1 followed students after they received a desirable exam grade. Sharing was associated with longer emotional episodes, more time spent thinking about the grade, and slower fading of emotion across time. Emotion intensity and duration were highest when the sharing targets were perceived as highlighting the importance and remarkability of the event. Study 2 experimentally manipulated responses to sharing after participants received a high score on a creativity test. Although no differences were observed across experimental conditions, for those who shared, the amount of sharing was associated with emotion intensity and duration. This effect was mediated by changes in appraisals of importance and remarkability.

Adolescence is a time of psychological transition and vulnerability. Youth who have been exposed to adverse family environments, particularly those having experienced maltreatment, are especially at risk for emotional and behavior problems. One important factor that may predict adolescents’ emotional well-being and behavior is their implicit beliefs about whether or not emotion can be controlled. The current study examines the links between implicit theories of emotion and internalizing symptoms and aggression in a sample of high-risk youth ages 10 to 17. 112 of the participants were maltreated and the remaining 69 formed a control group. Adolescents who expressed greater perceived control over their emotion reported lower levels of internalizing and aggressive behaviors. Although mean levels of implicit theories did not differ between maltreated and control groups, there was a trend towards maltreated youth being less likely to view their emotions as controllable compared to non-maltreated youth. These findings indicate that adolescents’ mindsets regarding the controllability of their emotions may have important implications for their mental health.

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