Mixed Emotional Reactions to Disappointing Wins and Relieving Losses

Because of counterfactual comparisons, good outcomes that could have been better (i.e., disappointing wins) and bad outcomes that could have been worse (i.e., relieving losses) elicit relatively middling ratings on bipolar emotion scales. We conducted two experiments with gambles to examine whether such outcomes elicit neutral emotions, sequentially mixed emotions of positive and negative affect, or simultaneously mixed emotions. In Experiment 1, static unipolar measures of positive and negative affect revealed that disappointing wins and relieving losses elicit mixed emotions, rather than relatively neutral emotions. In Experiment 2, participants provided continuous unipolar measures of positive and negative affect by pressing one button whenever they felt good and another button whenever they felt bad. Results revealed that disappointing wins and relieving losses elicit positive and negative affect simultaneously, rather than in alternation. How does it feel to receive a raise when an even larger raise had been expected? Though the raise itself may be enjoyable, the accompanying dashed expectations may be disappointing (Ortony, Clore, & Collins, 1988). The smaller-than-expected raise illustrates how emotional reactions are determined not only by an event’s objective outcome, but also by counterfactual comparisons with readily imagined outcomes that ‘‘might have been’’ (McMullen, Markman, & Gavanski, 1995; Roese & Olson, 1995). To explain the effects of counterfactual outcomes, Mellers, Schwartz, Ho, and Ritov (1997; Mellers & McGraw, 2001) proposed decision affect theory (DAT). According to DAT, the balance of pleasure and pain increases with utility of obtained outcomes, but decreases with utility of unobtained outcomes. By this account, a smaller-than-expected raise should elicit a middling emotional reaction, with the raise itself increasing the balance of pleasure and pain, but the comparison with the unobtained, larger raise having the opposite effect. Mellers et al. obtained results consistent with this prediction: Individuals enjoyed winning $16 when the alternative outcome was a loss, but gave less extreme, more middling ratings to winning $16 when the alternative was an even larger win of $32. One question that DAT leaves unanswered, however, is whether such middling ratings reflect neutrality or mixed emotions. In other words, do the pleasure and pain cancel each other out, or can they be experienced simultaneously? Following Russell and Carroll’s (1999) hypothesis that such polar opposite emotions as happiness and sadness are mutually exclusive in experience, one explanation for the findings of Mellers et al. (1997) is that disappointing wins elicit relatively neutral emotional reactions characterized by little positive or negative affect. In contrast, the evaluative-space model (ESM; Cacioppo & Berntson, 1994; Cacioppo, Gardner, & Berntson, 1999) proposes that positivity and negativity represent separable and partially distinct components of the affect system and thereby allows coactivation of positive and negative affect. In a test of the ESM (Larsen, McGraw, & Cacioppo, 2001), we had participants complete Russell and Carroll’s strictly unipolar measures of emotion during emotionally complex situations. After their own graduation ceremony, for example, undergraduates were asked whether they felt happy and, if so, how happy they felt on a 6-point scale. Sadness and other emotions were measured in an analogous fashion. Results were consistent with the ESM in that few undergraduates felt both happy and sad during a typical day on campus, but 50% felt both happy and sad on graduation day. These findings suggest that rather than eliciting relatively neutral emotions, disappointing wins may instead elicit mixed emotions of positive and negative affect. Though they afford strong tests of mixed emotions, Russell and Carroll’s (1999) measures provide only static indices of positive and negative affect. Therefore, they may be insensitive to rapid changes in affective reactions to disappointing wins. In light of Kahneman’s (1992) suggestion that disappointing wins elicit positive and negative affect in rapid alternation, a complete understanding of affective Address correspondence to Jeff T. Larsen, Department of Psychology, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX 79409; e-mail: jeff.larsen@ ttu.edu. Whereas research has generally confirmed DAT’s prediction that counterfactual comparisons elicit affective contrast, counterfactual comparisons can result in affective assimilation under certain conditions (e.g., process accountability; Markman & Tetlock, 2000). PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE Volume 15—Number 5 325 Copyright r 2004 American Psychological Society reactions to disappointing wins may require more temporally precise measures. To that end, we report two studies investigating the structure and time course of emotional reactions to disappointing wins and relieving losses (i.e., negative outcomes that could have been worse). In Experiment 1, we used Russell and Carroll’s measures of positive and negative affect to examine whether mixed outcomes (i.e., disappointing wins and relieving losses) elicit neutral or mixed emotions. In Experiment 2, we introduced continuous unipolar measures of positive and negative affect to examine whether mixed outcomes elicit positive and negative affect simultaneously or in rapid alternation.