A guaranteed immediate payout reduces impatience of financially constrained individuals.

A large stream of literature found that individuals who experience financial strain are particularly concerned about their present needs-that is, they are more likely to choose smaller immediate payoffs over larger future payoffs. In contrast, some recent findings suggest that financially constrained individuals may be more concerned about future needs instead (e.g., they are relatively more likely to invest in long-lived durables than in short-lived experiences). We propose that the use of traditional intertemporal choice tasks has made prior studies overly sensitive to the myopia-inducing effects of financial constraint. These tasks typically offer a choice between receiving a smaller payoff in the present versus a larger payoff in the future. Across three studies, we observe that, as long as some immediate payout is guaranteed, financially constrained individuals are as likely as nonconstrained individuals to accept a delay for a larger payoff. These findings qualify prior demonstrations of the myopic effects of financial constraint and suggest that the traditionally used choice paradigm might not accurately capture time preferences, particularly for financially constrained individuals. Furthermore, they provide possible interventions for those interested in reducing the myopia of financially constrained individuals who are facing all now versus all later decisions.

You're having fun when time flies: the hedonic consequences of subjective time progression.

Seven studies tested the hypothesis that people use subjective time progression in hedonic evaluation. When people believe that time has passed unexpectedly quickly, they rate tasks as more engaging, noises as less irritating, and songs as more enjoyable. We propose that felt time distortion operates as a metacognitive cue that people implicitly attribute to their enjoyment of an experience (i.e., time flew, so the experience must have been fun). Consistent with this attribution account, the effects of felt time distortion on enjoyment ratings were moderated by the need for attribution, the strength of the "time flies" naive theory, and the presence of an alternative attribution. These findings suggest a previously unexplored process through which subjective time progression can influence the hedonic evaluation of experiences.

Forgetting to remember our experiences: People overestimate how much they will retrospect about personal events.

People value experiences in part because of the memories they create. Yet, we find that people systematically overestimate how much they will retrospect about their experiences. This overestimation results from people focusing on their desire to retrospect about experiences, while failing to consider the experience's limited enduring accessibility in memory. Consistent with this view, we find that desirability is a stronger predictor of forecasted retrospection than it is of reported retrospection, resulting in greater overestimation when the desirability of retrospection is higher. Importantly, the desire to retrospect does not change over time. Instead, past experiences become less top-of-mind over time and, as a result, people simply forget to remember. In line with this account, our results show that obtaining physical reminders of an experience reduces the overestimation of retrospection by increasing how much people retrospect, bringing their realized retrospection more in line with their forecasts (and aspirations). We further observe that the extent to which reported retrospection falls short of forecasted retrospection reliably predicts declining satisfaction with an experience over time. Despite this potential negative consequence of retrospection falling short of expectations, we suggest that the initial overestimation itself may in fact be adaptive. This possibility and other potential implications of this work are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record

Questioning the end effect: Endings are not inherently over-weighted in retrospective evaluations of experiences.

The present research re-examines one of the most basic assertions regarding the evaluation of hedonic experiences: the end effect. The end effect suggests that the retrospective evaluation of an experience is disproportionately influenced by the final moments of the experience. The findings in this article indicate that endings are not inherently over-weighted in retrospective evaluations. That is, episodes do not disproportionately affect the evaluation of an experience simply because they occur at the end. We replicate findings that are consistent with the end effect, but provide additional evidence implicating other processes as driving factors of those findings.

A comparison between the use of dynamic mechanical analysis and oscillatory shear rheometry for the characterisation of hydrogels.

In this study the use of dynamic mechanical analysis (DMA) for the mechanical characterisation of pharmaceutical hydrogels was evaluated. DMA was used in two different modes, the "controlled force" and the "multi-strain" (MS). The results obtained on dextran methacrylate hydrogels of various compositions were compared to those obtained using an oscillatory shear rheometer. The best agreement was found between the MS-DMA and the rheometer results. The moduli measured in MS-DMA were extrapolated towards zero compression to obtain the modulus of the hydrogels. This procedure resulted in good agreement with the data obtained with the rheometer. Hydrogels were analysed after swelling to equilibrium with both methods, DMA and rheology. A scaling between the elastic modulus (G') and the equilibrium swollen polymer volume fraction (v(2,s)) could be found, although the best correlation between G' and v(2,s) was obtained with the rheometer.

You Could Have Just Asked: Reply to Francis (2012).

In an earlier article (Galak & Meyvis, 2011), we reported eight studies that demonstrate people's tendency to remember unpleasant experiences as more aversive when they think they will experience them again. Based on a test that, ironically, suffers from publication bias, Francis (2012) estimated that there is a high probability that we obtained at least one unsuccessful study that was left in the file drawer. He then argues that, because of this, our findings should be discounted. We propose that, instead of engaging in a statistical fishing expedition, Francis should have simply asked us for our file drawer. If he had done so, he would have quickly realized that a meta-analysis of all our studies (both published and unpublished) shows that the effect we reported is highly reliable. We suggest that when the answer is out there, it makes more sense to ask for it than to estimate it.

The pain was greater if it will happen again: the effect of anticipated continuation on retrospective discomfort.

Across 7 laboratory studies and 1 field study, we demonstrated that people remembered an unpleasant experience as more aversive when they expected this experience to return than when they had no such expectation. Our results indicate that this effect results from people's tendency to brace for unpleasant experiences. Specifically, when faced with the anticipated return of the experience, people prepare for the worst, leading them to remember the initial experience as more aversive. This bracing can be reduced either by limiting people's self-regulatory resources or by denying them the time to brace. These results indicate that people's tendency to remember aversive experiences as less unpleasant than they actually were (as demonstrated in prior research) does not necessarily imply that people are willing to re-engage in these experiences-because the anticipation of repeating the experience may counteract the initial memory bias.

Why don't we learn to accurately forecast feelings? How misremembering our predictions blinds us to past forecasting errors.

Why do affective forecasting errors persist in the face of repeated disconfirming evidence? Five studies demonstrate that people misremember their forecasts as consistent with their experience and thus fail to perceive the extent of their forecasting error. As a result, people do not learn from past forecasting errors and fail to adjust subsequent forecasts. In the context of a Super Bowl loss (Study 1), a presidential election (Studies 2 and 3), an important purchase (Study 4), and the consumption of candies (Study 5), individuals mispredicted their affective reactions to these experiences and subsequently misremembered their predictions as more accurate than they actually had been. The findings indicate that this recall error results from people's tendency to anchor on their current affective state when trying to recall their affective forecasts. Further, those who showed larger recall errors were less likely to learn to adjust their subsequent forecasts and reminding people of their actual forecasts enhanced learning. These results suggest that a failure to accurately recall one's past predictions contributes to the perpetuation of forecasting errors.

Beyond the Obvious: Chronic Vividness of Imagery and the Use of Information in Decision Making.

The authors investigate two competing hypotheses about how chronic vividness of imagery interacts with the vividness and salience of information in decision making. Results from four studies, covering a variety of decision domains, indicate that chronic imagery vividness rarely amplifies the effects of vivid and salient information. Imagery vividness may, in fact, attenuate the effects of vivid and salient information. This is because, relative to nonvivid imagers, vivid imagers rely less on information that appears obvious and rely more on information that seems less obvious. This tendency is so robust that vividness of imagery may amplify the effects of vivid information only when this information is the only information available in the decision field. The findings seem to reflect vivid imagers' tendency to totally immerse themselves in a decision problem and scrutinize the available information creatively. Copyright 2000 Academic Press.