The Causes and Consequences of Drifting Expectations

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Decision Science

Background:

• Awaiting uncertain outcomes can be distressing due to potential disappointment.
• People may
• brace for the worst
• by pessimistically lowering expectations to reduce negative prediction errors (PEs).
• It is unclear if expectations drift in real-world, high-stakes situations and how this affects emotional responses and learning.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether expectations pessimistically drift in high-stakes settings.
• To determine the factors influencing expectation drift.
• To assess the impact of expectation drift on emotional buffering and prediction error-based learning.

Main Methods:

• Examined expectation drift in 625 students awaiting exam grades.
• Analyzed the modulation of bracing by uncertainty.
• Assessed the effects of bracing on emotional responses and learning from prediction errors.

Main Results:

• Expectations were found to often drift, and tend to drift pessimistically.
• Bracing is preferentially modulated by uncertainty.
• Bracing transiently buffers negative PEs but impairs subsequent prediction error-based learning, sustaining future uncertainty.

Conclusions:

• Expectation drift, particularly pessimistic bracing, is a common phenomenon in high-stakes situations.
• While bracing offers short-term emotional relief from negative outcomes, it hinders adaptive learning.
• This impaired learning can paradoxically prolong uncertainty, highlighting a trade-off between immediate emotional regulation and long-term adaptive learning.