How do you feel now? On the perceptual distortion of extremely recent changes in anger

• We examine affect-based retrospective biases for extremely recent events. • We show that people show systematic biases in assessment of recent changes in anger. • We provide insight into revenge and its relation to in-group dynamics. a b s t r a c t a r t i c l e i n f o Keywords: Revenge Retrospective bias Affective forecasting Anger Ingroup Previous research on retrospective biases in emotion has been largely concerned with mistakes that are made when people are asked to recall temporally distant affective experiences (e.g. those that occurred weeks or months ago). However, far less is known about people's abilities to accurately track extremely recent shifts in affective experience. Across three experiments, we show that people consistently distort perception of a very recent change in anger after being reminded of a historical act of revenge (i.e. the assassination of Osama bin Laden). Consistent with the implications of the " revenge paradox " (Carlsmith, Wilson, & Gilbert, 2008) these reminders made participants more angry. However, participants believed that this act of revenge had made them less angry—the exact opposite of what happened—provided that their psychological allegiance to the ingroup had been primed. We discuss the implications of our findings in previous research on the interconnections between emotional experience and social categorization processes (Mackie, Maimer, & Smith, 2009), as well as the role of revenge in protecting the interests of the ingroup (Fehr & Gachter, 2002). have shown that people commit a multitude of errors when they are asked to predict their own emotions. In a study reported (1998), for example, researchers asked participants to predict how they would feel in the aftermath of a romantic breakup. Although participants correctly predicted that the breakup would have a negative impact , their actual reactions were neither as intense, nor as long lasting, as anticipated. Interestingly, people often make these and other types of errors in relatively familiar domains, in which they have a great deal of personal experience. Consider the aforementioned study on romantic breakups by Gilbert et al. (1998). In that study, many participants (who were in their late teens or early twenties) were likely to have already experienced the pain of a romantic breakup. Intuitively, one might imagine that such experience might lead people to realize that their mental models about emotional breakups were wrong, thus allowing them to make more accurate predictions in the …