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An emotion is a biological state defined by a collection of neurological and physiological changes that are associated with, triggered by, or result in an array of thoughts, behaviors, feelings, and pleasure or pain (or both).
Anticipation is an emotion centered on the predicted arrival of some event, change, or neurophysiological state.
In practice, that might mean anticipating a move to a new city, or anticipating how it will feel to eat the delicious meal you’re in the middle of preparing. It could mean anticipating a kiss from someone to whom you’re attracted, or anticipating a kiss from someone who grosses you out.
In each case, anticipation takes a different shape, each formed by a combination of elements like vigilance, curiosity, attentiveness, and expectancy.
Anticipation can trigger an unpleasant, worried stirring in the stomach, a flurry of concerns about new norms and habits, and the countless tasks—monumental and mundane—associated with moving one’s possessions, getting the electricity and internet hooked up in a new home, and learning a new set of faces and names and landmarks and street addresses.
It can also evoke preemptive enjoyment of food not yet tasted, but which we can imagine and savor ahead of time.
Anticipation can lead to arousal—sexual or a more general, alert and cognitively awake sort of arousal—or spark a preparatory, presumptive disgust at how horrible an expected kiss from someone we don’t find attractive will be.
There’s evidence that the anticipation we experience before buying something can be more pleasurable than the purchase, itself.
The size of the purchase doesn’t seem to tip the scale one way or the other, in terms of this effect: looking forward to buying a coffee at a corner shop on the way to work can in some cases be as pleasurable as anticipating the purchase of a fancy new jacket.
What does seem to make a difference is whether we’re purchasing a possession or an experience. Some research indicates that looking forward to a ski vacation can be far more pleasurable than looking forward to the purchase of a new laptop, even if the costs are similar, and the duration between deciding to make the investment and the acquisition/experience of the good or activity is the same.
It’s been posited that this distinction may be the result of experiences generally being more memorable than goods. A trip to Rome or a birthday spent bowling with friends will tend to lend us more memories with sensory and emotional resonance than the unboxing and setup of a new computer, or trying on a nice, new pair of shoes for the first time.
It’s also thought that perceptual anticipation may be at least partially the result of forecasting based on past experiences.
If we’ve derived pleasure from certain activities in the past, we’ll tend to glean more pleasure from the anticipation of similar activities in the future. Similarly, if we have a horrible experience with a certain type of activity, we may thenceforth experience dread and anxiety about the impending arrival of a similar activity.
There are a few takeaways from this collection of ideas and definitions worth focusing on.
The first is that our sense of what’s about to happen is heavily influenced by our perception of what’s happened in the past. This implies that regardless of the theoretical objective reality of what’s occurred, if we can adjust our sense of what we’ve been through, we can maybe adjust our anticipatory reflexes, as well.
Anticipatory stress may be reduced, then, by revisiting past experiences and focusing on positive outcomes while recategorizing the negative ones: either reminding ourselves that it wasn’t as bad as we worried it might be, or recognizing that there were benefits to having made it through that unpleasant experience.
Second is that it’s possible for other individuals and entities to manipulate our sense of future experiences by pulling our anticipation-strings.
The DMV or another bureaucratic entity might make waiting our turn more pleasant by keeping us entertained and comfortable, or by shuttling us through the process much more rapidly and helpfully than anticipated.
Businesses can also tug at these strings by amplifying our expectations of what the purchase of a particular good or service will feel like, and how long we’ll enjoy that shift in our neurophysiological state.
They can imply that our lives, for instance, that our way of being, our sense of happiness and enjoyment, will change in a fundamental way as a result of acquiring those new shoes, or because we took that trip to wherever.
This blend of aspiration and anticipation can heighten our desire to buy what they’re selling, while also introducing a bit of stress into the pleasure we feel leading up to the purchase. This stress keeps us focused on the goal of acquisition and reinforces our consumptive desire by implying that what we’re currently experiencing is a flawed and inferior version of our lives—and the only remedy is to make the prescribed acquisition.
Finally, it’s important to remember that arousal of any kind can influence and distort our perception of things.
It can cause us to focus our attention on different details than we normally might, it can cause us to filter for different sorts of information in our environments, it can cause us to interpret normal feelings and behaviors differently than we typically would, it can distort our sense of time, and it can result in a slew of physiological changes, ranging from increased heart rate and blood pressure, to a heightened awareness of potential threats.
Anticipation is the consequence of our brains and bodies trying to make predictions about what will happen next, and how we’ll feel as a consequence of those happenings.
It can trigger both immense stress and significant joy—sometimes simultaneously—and it’s not an inherently negative or positive thing: though it is an emotional state worth noticing, because of how much influence it can have on our thinking, choices, and behaviors.
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