Why does this matter for everyday decisions? People who feel stronger negative anticipatory emotions avoid risk more and prefer sooner rewards. Avoiding risky investments can reduce long‑term returns, and opting for smaller immediate rewards can narrow life opportunities. The study connects emotional experience to economic behavior: when the pain of imagining a bad outcome is high, people steer clear of uncertainty and rush to end the uncomfortable waiting. This link provides a behavioral explanation for patterns we see across saving, investing, and patience.
For anyone interested in human potential and inclusion, emotional asymmetries point to where support could change futures. Tools that reshape how people simulate outcomes, interventions that reduce the emotional cost of thinking about risks, or policies that lower real uncertainty could shift choices in meaningful ways. Follow the article to see how these laboratory ideas hold up in real populations and what that might mean for designing environments that help people take productive chances and plan for longer horizons.
Abstract
We are often preoccupied with the future, experiencing dread at the thought of future misery and savoring the thought of future pleasure. Prior lab studies have found that these anticipatory emotions influence decision-making. In this article, using economic survey data to estimate individual differences in anticipatory emotions, we find that the tendency to feel displeasure from anticipating future losses outweighs the pleasure from anticipating equal gains. We then relate asymmetries in anticipatory emotions to key economic preferences, finding that people with more strongly asymmetric anticipatory emotions are more risk-avoidant (because they obtain more disutility from contemplating downside risk) and more impatient (because they want to minimize the time spent contemplating risks). We conclude by considering how asymmetries in anticipatory emotions may be linked to a range of intertemporal and risky choice phenomena. Overall, our framework explains why risk-avoidance and impatience are linked, and we provide suggestive evidence for this explanation.
