Do Expectations Drive Our Emotions?
You wake up to the sound of a key scratching the lock on the front door, unsuccessfully searching for its opening. Now stumbling through the living room, your partner is failing their best attempt at ninja-like stealth. Peeling open one eyelid, you check the time. It’s 4 am. “I’ll be home before 10 pm” they had said. Tomorrow is going to be an absolute right off. YOU ARE PISSED!
For some, this might be a familiar scenario. Maybe you were the one in bed, or the one coming home late. Either way, at this point both individuals are having an emotional response to current events. Without thinking too hard, you could brush it off and let it go. But what if we go a little deeper, and look at why we get emotional?
At the heart of the issue lies our expectations. When an expectation is not met (i.e. the belief we held was wrong) it triggers an emotional response. The difference of reality (aka. the current state) and what we expect is what I refer to as expectation misalignment. What does that mean? Let’s look at the scenario above:
- There is an expectation: they’ll be home around 10 pm
- The current state: coming home at 4 am
- Misalignment
- Emotional response: anger and annoyance
How do you go from having an expectation to getting angry?
What we expect to happen, our level of confidence in it and the current state all combine to influence the type of emotional response (happy or sad) and how strongly we feel it (ecstatic or pleased). The following model breaks down these elements to learn how expectations play a pivotal role in driving our emotional responses.
In the previous article, we learnt that our expectations are the beliefs we hold about the future. Individually, beliefs are unique to us, given that on any topic we choose to accept what is right. We can believe that the world is flat or round, regardless of what science tells us. Therefore most topics or subjects sit nicely on a belief spectrum (Figure 1).
Please note that this model is a generalisation that can help provide clarity and understanding of specific emotional responses. It is not the be-all and end-all of emotional reasoning.
Let’s apply the scenario from the start of the article to break it down. Assuming your partner leaves just before 6 pm, you have the option to believe they will be home in the next few minutes, to the worst-case scenario that they won’t be coming back at all (Figure 2). This example happens to be on a time scale but can apply to anything. You could be selecting your next holiday destination and believe one country will be more enjoyable than another.
It is worth noting here, almost all of this happens in our subconscious. Rarely do we become aware of the other beliefs that may exist along the spectrum, let alone think about them in detail (though hopefully now you might start).
Depending on our experiences or the source of knowledge drawn on, beliefs will have varying degrees of confidence. So when your partner goes out, you think back on other nights out, which of their friends they were with, how they ended etc. You can then take that data and plot a confidence line on top of the belief spectrum, as seen in Figure 3.
As much as I love a normal distribution curve to make life easy and straightforward, it doesn’t apply here. Every confidence line will look different based on the experiences that support it. In Figure 3, the right-hand side of the confidence line rises quickly because coming home before 10 pm wouldn’t be that out of the ordinary. Not coming back at all is far less likely, so the left side has a long flat tail.
The highest point of the confidence line is where you’ll find your ideal state (Figure 4). Ideal in the sense that, if it comes “true” the expectation is confirmed and you were right (and your brain loves being right).
As we know, reality works differently. People aren’t always predictable, and our brain is juggling a million things at once. To make its job easier it uses shortcuts along the way, so it is allowed to be wrong on occasion. In this example, the current state ends up on a different part of the spectrum (Figure 5). This brings us back to our expectation misalignment idea. The further apart these sit on the spectrum, the more likely it is to cause a highly emotional reaction.
As we can see in Figure 6, the further down the confidence scale the current state intersects, the more significant the impact on our emotional response (Figure 6). As you can imagine, the effect of coming home four hours late (being pissed off) to coming home two days late (being sick with worry) are very different.
I know what some of you are probably thinking right now, there is no way that coming home after 5 minutes has the same emotional impact as not coming back at all. Yes, I agree. This isn’t a perfect representation, but hopefully, it’s helping to build a clearer picture.
Expectations don’t only cause negative emotional impacts, but can regularly trigger positive ones. If your partner was to come home earlier than you expected, it is likely to induce a positive emotional response (happiness or delight) though the intensity won’t be as high.
This model attempts to highlight how we can use expectations to achieve a better understanding of our emotional responses. By looking at the contrasting positions of an ideal state compared the current state of what really happened, we can start to examine why they differed and how future expectations may be realigned to reduce the impact felt.
Does it explain all of our emotions? Absolutely not, but a little extra help is always welcome.
Can you identify any expectation misalignments of your own? What actions might you make to change to realign them?
