Anticipatory emotion
Also known as: Anticipatory affect
The feelings you have now about an uncertain future event.
What it means
Anticipatory emotions are affective states experienced in the present about a prospective event, such as the dread before a medical test or the excitement before a trip, and they are felt now even though the event lies ahead. They are distinct from anticipated emotions, which are cold predictions of how one will feel later, because anticipatory emotions are immediate, visceral, and can override probability and consequence in driving choice. They figure centrally in the risk-as-feelings account, explaining why people pay to escape suspense or rush toward a thrill. Because they are felt rather than forecast, they are less subject to the systematic errors of affective forecasting but more prone to capture by salient cues. Distinguishing the two clarifies how emotion shapes decisions under uncertainty.
Why it happens
The brain does not wait for an event to respond to it. A cue that reliably predicts an outcome recruits much of the machinery the outcome itself would engage, so the feeling is less a symbol of the future than a partial rehearsal of it. In Berns and colleagues' shock study, dread tracked activity in parts of the cortical pain matrix, suggesting that waiting for pain partly runs the circuits that process pain. Because the response follows cue vividness rather than arithmetic, it scales with how sharply you picture the outcome, not with how probable it is. A vivid remote risk therefore outweighs a dull likely one.
What the evidence shows
Loewenstein's 1987 willingness-to-pay studies found people said they would pay more for a kiss delayed several days than one available immediately, and more to avoid a distant electric shock than an imminent one. Both patterns invert standard discounting: waiting carries its own utility, positive when savored and negative when dreaded. Berns and colleagues put a price on that in 2006, when some participants chose a stronger shock sooner over a weaker one later, paying real voltage to end the wait. Dawson and Johnson's 2026 panel analysis found dread outweighed savoring by roughly six to one, steeper than the two-to-one loss aversion ratio observed for realized outcomes.
Related but distinct
The two future-oriented emotions are neither identical nor independent. McClure and colleagues found in 2024 that anticipatory and anticipated ratings correlate strongly (rs > .45), with anticipatory ratings somewhat weaker at the participant level for positive events (d = .27) — the framing they set out to test, anticipatory emotion as a foretaste of the anticipated response. That difference did not survive their own higher-powered multilevel analysis, so treat the gap as unsettled. They also come apart under depression: higher depressive symptoms flattened anticipatory arousal while leaving anticipated arousal untouched. For measurement this matters. Asking how you will feel and how you feel now in one questionnaire yields answers that drift toward each other, so separating them takes deliberate wording and ideally a behavioral check.
Limits and caveats
The strongest counterweight comes from health research. Xu and Guo's 2019 meta-analysis found anticipated emotions correlated about .38 with intention and .48 with behavior, while anticipatory emotions managed roughly .25 and .18. For predicting whether someone gets screened or vaccinated, the cold forecast beats the hot feeling, which is not what a naive reading of risk-as-feelings predicts. Most evidence here is correlational and self-reported, the 1987 delay premiums come from hypothetical willingness-to-pay questions rather than money or shocks actually exchanged, the 2026 economic work rests on observational panel data, and a single rating made while imagining an event cannot cleanly separate a felt state from a fast prediction of one.
Using it in practice
Two moves follow. Bound the window: an exact date beats a range and a status that actually changes beats silence, because an open window lets dread keep accumulating on top of the wait. Then read the behavior correctly. Someone taking the earlier, worse appointment slot, or cancelling rather than waiting, is usually buying relief from the waiting rather than a better outcome, and scoring that as irrational misreads it. The inverse is an ethical line: manufacturing dread to force a decision is a dark pattern. And if the goal is to shift behavior, the meta-analytic evidence points at anticipated emotion instead.
Examples
The churning stomach the night before surgery is an anticipatory emotion, separate from your guess about how relieved you will feel afterward.
You check your phone every ten minutes waiting on the interview verdict, sick with dread now — not because you predict rejection will sting later, but because the waiting itself hurts.
Some fans dodge the football score all day to protect the thrill of watching later; others look it up immediately, giving up the whole match just to end the suspense.
An investor refreshes a falling portfolio all morning, then sells at the bottom. Selling ends the churning in the stomach; it does not improve the position. What the sale buys is an end to the watching, not a better price.
A shop that promises delivery in five to seven days and then goes silent leaves a wanted parcel sitting in an open wait. A tracker that advances through picked, packed and dispatched changes none of the total delay, only the openness of the window — the same days, now marked out as a countdown to something good rather than an interval to keep checking.
First described in Loewenstein, Weber, Hsee & Welch (2001).
Key references
- Dawson, C., & Johnson, S. G. B. (2026). Asymmetric anticipatory emotions and economic preferences: Dread, savoring, risk, and time. Cognitive Science, 50(1), e70160. doi.org/10.1111/cogs.70160
- Clayton McClure, J. H., Riggs, K. J., Dewhurst, S. A., & Anderson, R. J. (2024). Differentiating anticipated and anticipatory emotions and their sensitivity to depressive symptoms. Emotion, 24(7), 1642-1651. doi.org/10.1037/emo0001371
- Xu, Z., & Guo, H. (2019). Advantages of anticipated emotions over anticipatory emotions and cognitions in health decisions: A meta-analysis. Health Communication, 34(7), 774-781. doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2018.1434738
- Berns, G. S., Chappelow, J., Cekic, M., Zink, C. F., Pagnoni, G., & Martin-Skurski, M. E. (2006). Neurobiological substrates of dread. Science, 312(5774), 754-758. doi.org/10.1126/science.1123721
- Loewenstein, G. F., Weber, E. U., Hsee, C. K., & Welch, N. (2001). Risk as feelings. Psychological Bulletin, 127(2), 267-286. doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.127.2.267
- Loewenstein, G. (1987). Anticipation and the valuation of delayed consumption. The Economic Journal, 97(387), 666-684. doi.org/10.2307/2232929