Authors
Summary
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.
Volume
Volume: 50
Subjects
Notes
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Code: All analysis scripts and the accompanying codebook used in this study—including the simulations script—are available on the Open Science Framework at the following link: https://osf.io/n4c6q.
Open Access
© 2026 The Author(s). Cognitive Science published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Cognitive Science Society (CSS).