Poster #119 - Bracing for Disappointment: Children’s and Adults’ Reasoning about the Emotional Benefits of Lowering Expectations

• In Event: Poster Session 09

Abstract

While positive thinking can have immediate and long-term benefits (e.g., Carver et al., 2010), research on expectation-emotion connections has shown that there can be emotional costs to thinking optimistically and emotional benefits to thinking pessimistically once outcomes occur (Lara et. al., 2019; 2021; Sweeny & Shepperd, 2010). Although recent studies suggest that children demonstrate some understanding of how prior expectations influence future emotions as early as age 6 (Asaba et. al., 2019; Doan et. al., 2020), there is still much to learn about their knowledge about expectation-emotion connections through time.

In Study 1, 8- to 10-year-olds and adults (N=102) were presented with characters who varied in their expectations about a future event (e.g., a school raffle, see Figure 1) at two time points: (1) When first finding out about the future event, and (2) later that day immediately before learning the outcome. Whereas one character shifted from a high (e.g., “I’m pretty sure I’m going to win”) to a low expectation (e.g., “I’m pretty sure I’m going to lose”) over the course of the day, the other character shifted from a low to a high expectation (i.e., they first thought they were going to lose and later they expected to win). Participants predicted how each character would feel (7-point pictorial scale ranging from “very bad” to “very good”) after three different outcomes: Positive (high expectation met; e.g., they both win the big prize), negative (low expectation met; e.g., they both lose and get nothing), and attenuated (outcome not as good as the high expectation or as bad as the low expectation; e.g., they both win a small prize). Of central interest was whether children and adults attended to the sequence of prior expectations when judging how people will feel.

Results showed developmental continuities in judging the relevance of expectation timing in shaping future emotions. As shown in Figure 2, after positive outcomes (high expectation met), children and adults attributed equally positive emotions to both characters regardless of their prior expectation timing, Fs<3.80, ps>.054, ηp²s<.04. In contrast, when negative (low expectation met) or attenuated (between the high and low expectation) outcome occurred, 8- to 10-year-olds and adults predicted that the character who shifted from high to low expectations immediately before discovering the outcome would feel better than the character who changed from low to high expectations right before the outcome happened, Fs>5.63, ps<.020, ηp²s>.05. These patterns were more pronounced in adults than in children. This suggests that by 8 to 10 years of age children demonstrate awareness that proximal versus distal expectations carry the most weight in post-outcome emotions and that bracing for potentially disappointing outcomes by lowering expectations at the “moment of truth” can improve emotional wellbeing.

Given the similarities in 8- to 10-year-olds’ and adults’ reasoning, we are currently adapting these measures to an online platform to test younger children and adults (Study 2).

Results will be discussed in relation to the development of mind-emotion connections during middle childhood, with implications for emotion regulation and mental health.

Authors

• Sonakshi Khanna, University of California - Davis
  Presenting Author

• Lucy Stowe, University of California - Davis

• Hannah Jean Kramer, Queen’s University Belfast

• Karen Hjortsvang Lara, Southwestern University

• Kristin Hansen Lagattuta, University of California - Davis