Predicting Our Future Feelings: The Role of Working Memory for Emotion

Abstract

One key element of decision making is predicting how different outcomes will make us feel. While individuals vary considerably in this ability, known as affective forecasting, the reasons for this variability in prediction accuracy are largely unknown. This dissertation aims to uncover why some people are better forecasters than others. We test the hypothesis that affective forecasting is supported by a fundamental psychological ability—i.e., affective working memory. Affective working memory refers to the distinct domain of working memory responsible for actively maintaining and working with feeling states. Because affective forecasting requires conjuring up and maintaining emotional experiences for evaluation, we predicted that individuals who are better able to maintain feeling states (i.e., superior affective working memory), would be more accurate in predicting their future feelings. Across Study 1 (Study 1a: N = 66; Study 1b: N = 68) and Study 2 (N = 96), results emerged in support of this hypothesis such that working memory for emotion uniquely predicted affective forecasting accuracy, whereas working memory for perceptual (i.e., brightness) information, did not. In Study 3 (N = 85), we more firmly establish the selective relationship between forecasting accuracy and affective working memory, finding that performance on two additional, widely used measures of visual working memory does not explain any variability in forecasting accuracy beyond the variability explained by affective working memory. In Study 4 (N =76), we find that this relationship between affective working memory and forecasting accuracy generalizes to a real-world event where we measured predicted and experienced feelings to the outcome of the 2020 United States presidential election. Thus, across the studies presented in this dissertation, we find consistent evidence that individual differences in the ability to maintain emotional experiences predicts variability in forecasting accuracy. These findings advance our understanding of the mechanistic underpinnings of forecasting accuracy and demonstrate that affective working memory is a core psychological process underlying higher-order emotional thought, including emotional prospection.