Affective working memory predicts ability to forecast feelings

We use working memory every day, whether it be during a conversation with a friend or working through our shopping list. This is a form of short-term memory that allows you to actively hold and manipulate pieces of information in your mind for brief periods. If you've studied psychology, it's likely you're already familiar with this idea, but you may be less familiar with another form of working memory uncovered by recent research — one that works not with information, but with emotions, or feeling states. 

This is called 'affective working memory'. And now a new paper in Emotion reports that a group of American participants who had a better affective working memory were also better at predicting how they would feel about the result of the 2020 US presidential election. These new findings "underscore the potential importance of affective working memory in some forms of higher order emotional thought," write lead author Colleen Frank and colleagues at the University of Michigan. 

In a paper on affective working memory from 2019, Patricia Reuter-Lorenz, who is also one of the authors of the new study, and colleagues reviewed the research in the field and proposed that affective working memory "is a fundamental mechanism of the mind". By allowing us to hold feelings in mind, this form of memory enables emotions to influence our thoughts, decisions and actions.

If you can accurately remember how you felt last the time you went to a work party, say, or after going for a run, holding these recalled feelings in mind could then help you to decide whether to do the same thing again, or to adjust your behaviour in some way. Although psychological research treats our thoughts and decision-making as being separate to our emotional experiences, Reuter-Lorenz and her team argued that in daily life, they are in fact closely intertwined. 

Just as studies have found differences in information-based working memory ability, earlier research has also found differences between people in affective working memory. Some people, it seems, are better at holding feeling states in mind than others. 

To explore whether these differences might affect people's ability to predict how they would feel in the wake of a major event, Frank and her colleagues got 76 American adults, aged 18-29 and living in 32 different states, to complete various surveys before and after the 2020 Presidential election. 

Just before the election, the participants completed a test of affective working memory. In this test, they viewed a series of images designed to evoke emotional responses, and the team assessed how clearly and precisely they held their emotional reactions in mind over a delay. The participants also predicted how happy, angry, and scared they would feel if Joe Biden won the election, or Donald Trump won. They also completed a working memory task that was not related to emotions. 

Then, about ten days after the election (six days after the result was officially called), the participants reported on how happy, angry, and scared they were feeling about Biden's victory. 

The team found that participants who had scored higher on the affective working memory test were better at predicting how they actually felt after the election. Their performance on the other working memory task had no influence on their ability to accurately predict their feelings, however. This suggests that differences in affective working memory, specifically, explained the results. "Just as cognitive working memory may provide the mental workspace for complex cognitive tasks, affective working memory may provide the mental workspace for mental simulations where feelings play a prominent role," the authors write. 

However, the team did not find a link between scores on the affective working memory task and answers to another set of questionnaires, which asked the participants to predict how they would feel about everyday life events, such as receiving praise from a teacher, and then later to indicate how they had felt when these events had taken place. 

The mixed results overall suggest a "diversity" of processes underlying our ability to predict our future feelings, the team writes. In other words, affective working memory performance does not seem to be the only factor involved. It's also worth noting that the study had a few limitations, particularly the small sample size. 

Still, this work does provide new insights into why some people are better at predicting how they will feel in the future than others. And since these predictions affect our willingness to engage in all kinds of unhealthy or unhelpful as well as positive, healthy activities, further research into what drives these differences, and how to improve the accuracy of our predictions, is clearly needed. 

Read the paper in full: https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0001258