The Affective Trade-Offs We Make |
In my conception of the Affect Management Framework (AMF; Haynes-LaMotte, 2025), affect is defined as an evaluative common currency in consciousness that is attached to the brain’s goals and can be swayed by a combination of interoceptive senses, meaning-making processes, the processing dynamics of exteroceptive senses (sight and hearing), and the proprioceptive signals used to control the body. My previous post provided an overview of the framework. This post will explore additional principles.
People generally make decisions based on how they predict those decisions would affectively feel, whether or not that prediction is truly accurate (referred to as affective forecasting (Wilson & Gilbert, 2005). For example, someone may choose not take a chance on something due to a sense of loss aversion, even though research suggests that loss aversion is an affective forecasting error (Kermer, Driver-Linn, Wilson, & Gilbert, 2006).
There are several other pieces of evidence for the anticipatory nature of affect management. A meta-analysis by DeWall, Baumeister, Chester, and Bushman (2016) found that anticipated emotion from taking an action was much more strongly related to behaviors and judgments than was currently experienced emotion.
In one illustration of this, my study (LaMotte, Khan, Farrell, & Murphy, 2025) investigated how mood repair motives are involved in abusive relationship behaviors. Men who were court-mandated to be in an Abuse Intervention Program were asked to imagine themselves in several difficult relationship situations (e.g., your partner tells someone else your private information). They were then asked how strongly they would feel different emotions, how strongly they would want to stop feeling them, how much they thought different behaviors would help repair their mood, and how likely they would be to do each behavior if the situation happened to them. The results showed that, across both abusive and non-abusive behavioral responses, there was a strong association between what participants thought would make them feel better and what they would do.
Consistent with these findings and covering a broader range of contexts, a meta-analysis by Chitraranjan and Botenne (2024) found a strong relationship between behavioral intentions and anticipated affect from those behaviors (r = .61).
Affect management is not only operating at times of extreme emotion, but can also........