Emotions in time: Moral emotions appear more intense with temporal distance

Abstract in Undetermined How intense do people expect their future emotional reactions to be? This should depend on the fit between the social perspective (near vs. distant) involved in the emotion and the emotion-eliciting event’s temporal distance. Temporal distance and social distance are interrelated (Trope & Liberman, 2010). We therefore argue that people should anticipate experiencing emotions that involve taking a socially distant perspective (e.g., guilt and shame in contrast to pleasure and sadness) with greater intensity when they predict their emotional reactions for distant-future events. The results from a series of experiments confirmed this prediction. Moreover, it was found that when people imagine emotional experiences that necessitate taking a more socially distant perspective, they construe these experiences to be more temporally distant.