41 checked facts

Emotion

Everything on this site about emotion — each one naming the study behind it.

You struggle to remember joyful moments while feeling sad.
Mood-congruent memory is the phenomenon where your current emotional state dictates the accessibility of your past mem…
Your memories ignore the duration of your past experiences.
The study was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (JPSP).…
Your brain processes positive concepts faster than negative ones.
The Pollyanna principle describes a systematic human tendency to favor positive information in memory and processing.…
You overestimate how your future self will feel.
The projection bias causes you to project your current tastes or preferences onto your future decisions.…
You think your happiness depends on one specific circumstance.
Focalism is the tendency to overestimate the extent to which one specific event will impact your long-term emotional s…
You want what you are told you cannot have.
Psychological reactance is a motivational state that occurs when your freedom to choose is threatened or eliminated.…
You feel more attraction when your heart rate is high.
The misattribution of arousal causes you to interpret unrelated physical excitement as romantic interest.…
You cannot accurately predict your own emotional responses.
A 2005 study showed that people in a calm state consistently underestimate how much intense emotions will drive their …
You judge your current life against those performing better.
The term 'upward social comparison' emerged from later developments in social comparison theory, building upon but dis…
Your feelings dictate your risk assessment before logic starts.
The affect heuristic is the process of using current emotions to make rapid decisions instead of evaluating complex da…
You think your nerves are obvious to everyone around.
Research shows people overestimate how effectively others read their internal states, a phenomenon known as the illusi…
You are more troubled by almost winning than losing.
Counterfactual thinking explains why a bronze medalist is often happier than a silver medalist.…
You consistently mispredict how long your emotional reactions will last.
People significantly overestimate how long they will feel sad after a breakup or happy after a promotion.…
Your brain actively edits your past to be more pleasant.
Participants in a 1997 study reported that their past vacations were significantly more enjoyable than they had rated …
Your brain prioritizes negative news over positive feedback.
Negativity bias dictates that, across a variety of domains, negative information is processed more deeply and remember…
Your brain prioritizes bad news over good news.
A 2001 review confirmed that negative events, emotions, and interactions have a greater impact on your psychological s…
You confuse high physiological arousal for romantic attraction.
The brain often misinterprets physical adrenaline or fear as feelings of attraction toward a person nearby.…
You forget the negative emotions of past events faster.
The emotional intensity associated with negative memories fades more rapidly than the intensity of positive memories.…
Your mood acts as a filter for your memory.
People are significantly more likely to recall memories that match their current emotional state than those that do no…
You judge an idea by how it makes you feel.
The research on the affect heuristic regarding risk-benefit assessments was established by Finucane, Alhakami, Slovic …
Nothing is as important as you think it is.
A 1998 study showed that students believed living in a sunny climate would significantly boost happiness, despite data…
You feel more regret for things that nearly happened.
Counterfactual thinking causes stronger emotional reactions to 'near misses' than to outcomes that were never possible…
Your brain weighs bad experiences more than good ones.
Negative stimuli elicit stronger physiological and psychological responses than positive stimuli.…
Your recall improves when you return to your original mood.
A 1981 study showed that participants remembered information better if they were in the same emotional state during re…
You focus on one event while ignoring context.
A 2000 study showed that people overestimate the impact of a single focal event on their overall happiness.…
You remember events as better than they were.
The study titled 'Temporal adjustments in the evaluation of events: The rosy prospection and rosy retrospection' was p…
You remember the vacation better than the experience.
People report higher satisfaction for past events than they did while the events were actually occurring.…
The silver medalist is sadder than the bronze.
A 1995 study found that Olympic silver medalists showed significantly less happiness than bronze winners.…
Bad news is heavier than good news.
A 2008 review found that humans process negative stimuli faster, remember them longer, and react to them more intensel…
Fear and attraction often feel exactly the same.
A 1974 study found that men were significantly more likely to call a female interviewer after crossing a scary suspens…
Your brain gives more weight to bad news.
While Hansen and Hansen (1988) identified an 'anger superiority effect,' subsequent research indicates this finding is…
The pain of losing is stronger than the joy of winning.
Prospect theory demonstrates that losses are weighted more heavily than equivalent gains, a phenomenon known as loss a…
You assume people notice your mood more than they do.
The 'illusion of transparency' causes individuals to overestimate how much their internal state is visible to others.…
You adopt the mood of the room without choosing.
A 1994 research review found that people automatically mimic the facial expressions and postures of those around them.…
You create obstacles to explain your potential failure.
A 1978 experiment showed that people who are uncertain about their performance will intentionally choose to hinder the…
You assess risks as lower because you feel good.
A 2000 study demonstrated that affective evaluation of an activity, influenced by information framing, causes inverse …
You often misinterpret your own physical anxiety as attraction.
Heightened physical arousal from an external source is frequently mislabeled as intense romantic or social interest.…
You consistently overestimate how long you will feel hurt.
People regularly miscalculate the duration and intensity of their emotional reactions to future negative events.…
We spend more mental energy processing bad news than good.
A 2001 review concluded that humans consistently pay more attention to, and retain, negative information over positive…
Others cannot see your internal emotions as clearly as you.
In a 1998 study, speakers consistently overestimated how much their audience could detect their internal anxiety or li…
Moving to a warmer climate rarely improves long-term happiness.
A 1998 survey found that while Midwesterners expected Californians to be happier, there was no significant difference …