Reconstructing Memory for Emotions

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 1997. Vol. 126. No. 2, 165-177

Copyright 1997 by Ihe Am

n Psychological Association, Inc. 0096-3445/97/S3.00

Reconstructing Memory for Emotions Linda J. Levine University of California, Irvine

This research assessed the stability of peoples' memory for their past emotions over time and the role of changing appraisals in accounting for biases in emotion recall. Following Ross Perot's abrupt withdrawal from the presidential race in July 1992, supporters (N = 227) rated their initial emotional reactions and described their interpretations of the event. After the elections in November, supporters (N = 147) again recalled their initial emotional reactions and described their current appraisals of Perot. In contrast to some current models, memories for past emotions were not indelible, and a general tendency to overestimate the intensity of past emotions was not observed. Rather, systematic distortions in emotion recall were found in the direction of consistency with current appraisals. These findings support the conclusion that memories for emotional responses are partially reconstructed or inferred on the basis of current appraisals of events.

On July 16, 1992, Ross Perot announced his decision not to pursue his undeclared candidacy for the office of President of the United States. This announcement came as a shock to Perot's supporters, many of whom reacted with outrage or despair. For his supporters, Perot's withdrawal from the race had all the elements typically associated with the creation of vivid and lasting memories. The event was surprising, associated with intense emotion, and viewed by these individuals as being of tremendous personal and social importance (e.g., Brown & Kulik, 1977; Conway, 1995; Winograd & Neisser, 1992). Whereas most studies of emotional memories have focused on the stability or accuracy of memory for the events that elicited emotion (for reviews see Blaney, 1986; Christiansen, 1992a), the present study asked a different question: How stable are people's memories for their own past emotions? Memory for past feelings was thus the focus of the study rather than memory for the circumstances in which the event was experienced or for details of the event itself. Shortly after Perot withdrew from the presidential race,

supporters were asked to recall how sad, angry, and hopeful they had felt when they first learned of Perot's withdrawal. Supporters also described their interpretations or appraisals of Perot's decision to withdraw. After the presidential elections in November, supporters again recalled their initial reactions to Perot's withdrawal and described their current appraisals of Perot. The two memory assessments were separated by a dramatic turnabout in Perot's behavior and status. After being denounced in the media as a "quitter" (e.g., "The Quitter," 1992), Perot reentered the race in October and, though he lost, took nearly a fifth of the popular vote nationwide. Indeed, Perot received more votes than had any independent candidate in U.S. history who had not previously served as president (Gillespie, 1993). As a result of this turnabout, the appraisals of many of Perot's supporters changed significantly between initial and subsequent recall of their emotional reactions. The aims of this study were twofold: (a) to assess the stability over time of memories for past emotional reactions and (b) to assess the role of changing appraisals in accounting for biases in emotion recall. This research draws on and extends work by M. Ross (1989) on memory for attitudes and work by Christiansen and Safer (1996) and Eich and his colleagues (Eich, Reeves, Jaeger, and Graff-Radford, 1985) on memory for emotions and pain. Investigating memory for past emotions is of practical as well as theoretical importance. On a practical level, diagnostic and treatment decisions concerning mental disorders are partly based on individuals' self-reports of then- past emotional responses. Numerous clinical instruments ask people to rate the intensity and frequency with which they have experienced affective states such as depression and anger over the past weeks or months (Christiansen & Safer, 1996; Thomas & Diener, 1990). In nonclinical settings, memories for past emotions inform people's plans for the future. People plan to maintain circumstances that evoked positive emotions and to avoid or change circumstances that evoked negative emotions. Moreover, people's past emotional reactions play a vital role in the construction of personal identity (Neimeyer & Metzler, 1994). Generalizing

The research described in this article was part of a larger project. For detailed analyses of the causes and consequences of participants' initial feelings of sadness, anger, and hope, please see L. }. Levine (1996). Preliminary accounts of this work were presented at the 36th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Los Angeles, November 1995, and at the meetings of the International Society for Research on Emotion, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, August 1996. I wish to thank the respondents who generously shared their thoughts and feelings. I am also grateful to Robert Newcomb, Stewart Burgess, Susan Bluck, Frances Rauscher, Janel Alberts, John Rice, and Judith Goodman for their helpful comments on a draft of this article and to Rachelle Ang, Jennifer Brown, Chermeen Elavia, Kim Lisnek, Mara McClain, Nghia Nguyen, Lynette Tay, and Heidi Williamson for coding data. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Linda J. Levine, Department of Psychology and Social Behavior, University of California, Irvine, 3340 Social Ecology n, Irvine, California 92697-7085. Electronic mail may be sent via Internet to [email protected].

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from such memories, people come to view themselves as, for example, "the type of person who grieves at the misfortune of others," "a person who loves parlies," or "a poor loser." It thus becomes important to determine how people recall their past emotions and what factors might be associated with stability or distortion of these memories over time. Such an investigation is also central to theoretical concerns regarding whether emotions leave indelible memory traces (e.g., Christianson, 1992b; LeDoux, 1992; Zajonc, 1980) or whether they are subject to the types of distortions and biases that characterize memory for other aspects of autobiographical events (e.g., Markus, 1986; McCloskey, Wible, & Cohen, 1988; Neisser & Harsch, 1992).

Indelible Memories or Reconstructed Accounts? According to LeDoux (1992), memories for the emotional significance of events are stored permanently and are mediated by different brain circuits than are memories for events themselves (see also McGaugh, 1992). This claim is partly based on the finding that, once extinguished, classically conditioned avoidance responses can be reinstated by exposure to a stressful stimulus. Thus extinction does not erase the emotional memory, it simply suppresses the behavioral response. Similarly, Zajonc (1980) contended that affective reactions may be readily retrieved even when the events that evoked the reactions have been forgotten. He argued for a separate memory store for affective responses based on the "mere exposure" effect: Visual stimuli, presented so briefly that people were unable to recall having previously seen them, were nevertheless preferred to new stimuli. Also consistent with the existence of a separate memory store for emotions are case studies in which negative emotions were dissociated from memories of the events that evoked them (Christianson, 1992b). Other investigators have argued, however, that emotions are not stored directly in memory at all, but rather are reconstructed based on memories of the emotion-eliciting circumstances (for a review, see Ross, 1991). William James held that recalling past circumstances causes an individual to experience a similar but new emotion in the present (1890/1950). Indeed, when Strongman and Kemp (1991) asked people to remember a time in which they had experienced each of 12 emotions, the circumstances associated with the emotion were almost always included in participants' descriptions, but physiological and behavioral responses were typically omitted. A few studies have assessed the accuracy of emotion recall directly. Most have shown a bias toward overestimating emotional intensity (i.e., a bias more consistent with at least partial reconstruction, than with direct recall, of past emotions). Brewer (1988) had undergraduates record randomly selected autobiographical events in diaries and recall them an average of 9, 78, and 149 days after their occurrence. Emotions were among the event attributes that were least well recalled. Thomas and Diener (1990) had undergraduates keep detailed mood diaries for 3 or 6 weeks. When asked to recall their emotions one week later, students overestimated the

intensity of both positive and negative emotions and underestimated the frequency of positive affect as compared to negative affect. Overestimation of negative affect was also found when students were asked to recall the intensity of their pre-exam anxiety (Devito & Kubis, 1983; Keuler & Safer, unpublished, as cited in Christianson & Safer, 1996). Psychiatric patients have also been shown to overestimate past symptoms of depression (Schrader, Davis, Stefanovic, & Christie, 1990; Zimmerman & Coryell, 1986). Christianson and Safer (1996) conclude a review of this literature with the statement that there is apparently no published study in which a group of participants has accurately recalled the intensity or frequency of their previously recorded emotions. The causes of this inaccuracy remain to be explored. Past studies of emotional memory include features that might contribute to inaccurate recall. The emotions assessed in diary studies tend to be fairly mild responses to routine daily events. Psychiatric patients estimated how depressed they had felt a week or several months ago, but were not asked to recall their emotional responses to a particular, salient event. In addition, several studies asked participants to generalize across specific emotions by making global ratings of positive versus negative affect or level of stress. These features provide important information about memory for day-to-day emotional experience, but they may also lead to errors. People might correctly remember how they felt in the past but attribute their emotions to the wrong period of time (Bradburn, Huttenlocher, & Hedges, 1994; Brewer, 1988), or they might make errors in generalizing across discrete emotional states. The current study was designed to enhance the likelihood of demonstrating stable recall of emotions, if intense emotions do lead to the formation of permanent memories. To this end, participants were asked to recall their emotional reactions to a particular event of great personal significance: finding out that Perot had dropped out of the presidential race. These emotions occurred at a specific, highly meaningful point in time, and were likely to have been intense (see also Devito & Kubis, 1983; Keuler & Safer, unpublished, as cited in Christianson & Safer, 1996). Participants were also asked to recall discrete emotional responses of sadness, anger, and hope rather than to generalize across emotional states (see also Brewer, 1988). To the extent that memories for past emotions are not stable over time, a second goal of this study was to examine the sources of bias. Thomas and Diener (1990) suggest that emotional responses are more vivid (and hence more available for recall) than neutral responses, leading to overestimates of intensity and frequency. Memories may also be biased by people's current beliefs about how they must have felt in the past. For example, psychiatric patients in treatment programs and students who have completed an exam might presume that they must have felt much worse in the past than they currently do. Past studies of memory for emotions have not assessed participants' current beliefs, but related research suggests that current experience can play an important role in biasing recall.

RECONSTRUCTING MEMORY FOR EMOTIONS

Sources of Bias in Memory for Pain, Attitudes, and Emotions Emotions are multidimensional responses that typically combine sensory awareness of bodily changes (e.g., Izard, 1993; James, 1890/1950) and cognitive appraisals or interpretations of events (e.g., Lazarus, 1991). Research on memory for past sensory experiences such as pain and for past attitudes can thus be used to shed light on the mechanisms that might underlie biases in emotion recall. The general finding regarding people's ability to recall past states of pain has been that such recollections are frequently inaccurate (Eich et al., 1985; Kent, 1985; Linton & Melin, 1982) and show only modest correlations with initial reports of pain intensity (Beese & Morley, 1993; Erskine, Motley, & Pierce, 1990). Whereas the intensity of acute pain (e.g., dental surgery, childbirth) has occasionally been found to be underestimated in recall (e.g., Lowe & Roberts, 1988), chronic pain is typically overestimated (for a review, see Erskine et al., 1990). Current pain experience may mediate both memory biases. In a number of recent studies, pain memories have been found to be biased in the direction of current experience (Bryant, 1993; Norvell, GastonJohansson, & Fridh, 1987; Smith & Safer, 1993; for a review see Salovey, Sieber, Jobe, & Willis, 1994). For example, Eich and his colleagues (Eich et al., 1985) assessed recall of pain in 57 patients with a history of chronic headaches who were participating in a pain-management program. Patients experiencing intense pain at the time of recall tended to overestimate their past feelings of pain, whereas patients experiencing mild pain at the time of recall tended to underestimate the intensity of past pain. Research on recall of previously held attitudes also demonstrates a bias toward current experience (for a review, see Ross, 1989). In several studies, participants were induced to change their attitudes and then asked to recall attitudes that they had reported earlier (e.g., Bern & McConnell, 1970; Goethals & Reckman, 1973). The results show that people tend to recall past attitudes as more consistent with present attitudes than they actually were. In a naturalistic study of this phenomenon, McFarland and Ross (1987) had participants rate their impressions of their dating partners initially and again after 2 months. When recalling attributes that they expected to remain stable over time, participants whose impressions became more favorable over time recalled their initial evaluations as having been more positive than they actually were. Participants whose impressions became less favorable recalled more negative evaluations (see also Festinger, 1957; Ross, 1996). Cognitive theories of emotion can be used to suggest how current experience might bias memory for emotions. According to these theories, people experience emotions primarily when they appraise events (consciously or unconsciously) as either facilitating or obstructing their goals, and it becomes necessary to revise their goals or construct new plans (e.g., Frijda, 1987; Oatley & Johnson-Laird, 1987; Ortony, Clore, & Collins, 1988; Stein & Levine, 1987, 1990). Thus, when gaps exist in people's memories for their

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past emotions, emotional memories may be reconstructed based on recall of both the emotion-eliciting circumstances and past appraisals of those circumstances. If people's appraisals have changed dramatically since the occurrence of the emotion-eliciting event, they may show a bias toward recalling emotions that are consistent with their current appraisals. A recent study of memory for marital interactions provides some support for this view. Men who had developed more negative attitudes toward their spouses over time recalled early marital interactions as having evoked less positive feeling than initially reported (Holmberg & Holmes, 1994). On the basis of accounts of autobiographical events, responses to vignettes, and experimental manipulations of mood, several cognitive models of emotion have been proposed describing the appraisals that elicit specific emotions (e.g., Frijda, 1987; Levine, 1995, 1996; Oatley & JohnsonLaird, 1987; Ortony, Clore, & Collins, 1988; Roseman, 1991; Scherer, 1984; Smith & Lazarus, 1993; Stein & Levine, 1987, 1990; Stein, Trabasso, & Liwag, 1993; Weiner, 1985). These models can be used to predict how specific emotions will be recalled. Anger, for example, is typically evoked when people direct their attention toward die person or conditions responsible for goal failure in an attempt to remove obstacles to then" goals (e.g., Averill, 1982; Levine, 1995,1996; Smith & Lazarus, 1993; Stein & Levine, 1987, 1989; Werner, 1985). Thus, memory for the intensity of past feelings of anger may be influenced by a person's current appraisals concerning whether or not another person was responsible for goal failure. Greater memory stability may be expected if attributions of blame have remained constant over time than if these attributions have changed. In contrast to anger, sadness is typically evoked when a loss is viewed as irrevocable (e.g., Levine, 1995, 1996; Scherer, 1984; Smith & Lazarus, 1993; Stein & Levine, 1987, 1989). Memory for the intensity of past feelings of sadness should be more stable if people continue to regard an event as an irrevocable loss, than if they reappraise the event as having been of little significance. Hope is associated with the belief that goals may yet be attained in the future (e.g., Levine, 1996; Ortony, Clore, & Collins, 1988; Roseman, 1991). Thus, memory for feelings of hope should be influenced by the stability of people's beliefs about whether a past goal is desirable and has a chance of being attained. Perot's initial withdrawal from the presidential race, followed by his reentry and relatively good showing in the elections, provided the setting for a powerful natural experiment on the effects of changing appraisals on people's memories for past emotions. Supporters were grouped based on how their appraisals of Perot had changed over time. The relations between initially reported and recalled intensity ratings for anger, sadness, and hope were examined for each group. Supporters who turned against Perot after his withdrawal but later returned and supported him were expected to underestimate then1 initial feelings of anger. In contrast, supporters who turned against Perot after his withdrawal and continued to blame him were expected to show greater stability in their memories for past feelings

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of anger. To the extent that they no longer viewed a Perot presidency as a desirable goal and Perot's withdrawal as an irrevocable loss, however, this group was expected to underestimate past feelings of hope and sadness. Supporters who remained loyal to Perot were expected to overestimate how hopeful they had felt when Perot first withdrew. If memories for emotion are reconstructed in this manner, recall of past emotions need not be mood congruent. Current appraisals of the emotion-eliciting event should be more predictive of memory biases than a person's mood at the time of recall. For example, supporters who turned against Perot may be expected to underestimate early feelings of hope, even if they felt quite pleased and hopeful about the outcome of the presidential election at the time of recall. Nor does one expect a general tendency to underestimate or overestimate emotional intensity. Rather, memory may be biased in the direction of the emotions that would have resulted if the emotion-eliciting event occurred in the context of current appraisals. A limitation that this study shares with many other studies involving highly emotional events is the need to restrict the inferences drawn to the stability of memory reports over two points in time rather than assessing the accuracy of memory for initial emotional responses. Researchers rarely have access to intense emotional reactions at the time they are occurring (e.g., Bohannon & Symons, 1992; Brown & Kulik, 1977; McCloskey, Wible, & Cohen, 1988; but see Linton, 1982; Neisser & Harsch, 1992). Instead, as in the current study, later memories are compared to earlier ones, and there is no guarantee that the early memories are distortion free. Mood-induction techniques performed in the laboratory and randomly sampled diary studies are valuable because they do allow assessments of the accuracy of recall for emotions (e.g., Brewer, 1988; Thomas & Diener, 1990), but these methods typically sample milder emotional reactions. An open question is whether the levels of distortion associated with recall of milder emotions generalizes to memory for emotional events considered to be life changing at the time of their occurrence.

Method Participants Ten days after Ross Perot's July 16 announcement of his withdrawal from the presidential race, questionnaires were sent to 492 of his supporters. The supporters were residents of Riverside County, California, primarily from the Coachella Valley area, who had either signed a petition to put Perot on the ballot or had volunteered to work for his campaign. Sixteen questionnaires were returned due to incorrect addresses. Of the remaining 476 questionnaires, 227 people (48%) completed and returned them: 173 people returned the original questionnaire, and an additional 54 people returned an identical questionnaire that was sent to those who had not responded within 5 weeks. Fifty-eight percent of the 227 respondents completed the questionnaire within 4 weeks of Perot's withdrawal, and 99% had completed it within 10 weeks. On October 1, Perot announced that he was reentering the race. Three questionnaires that were completed after this announcement were omitted from analyses.

Responses to demographic questions indicated that respondents ranged in age from 22 to 84 years, with a mean of 59 years. Ninety percent of the respondents were Caucasian; 2% were African American, Hispanic, or other; the remaining 8% did not indicate their race. By chance, 106 of the respondents were men and 106 were women; 15 respondents did not indicate their sex. Most were middle-class with an average yearly family income of $45,000$55,000. A large percentage of the respondents were retired (40%). Many of those still working (19%) listed their professions as managerial, administrative, executive, or professional specialties. The rest listed a diverse range of occupations such as sales, homemaker, and armed services. Supporters who stated their political affiliations were fairly balanced between Republicans (33%), Democrats (24%), and Independents (32%). When asked to rate their political orientation on a 5-point scale ranging from "very liberal" to "very conservative," most of the respondents considered themselves to be either moderate or somewhat conservative (M = 3.34). Almost all of the respondents (94%) had planned to vote for Perot in the upcoming presidential election. All had supported Perot for at least 1 month (M = 5 months, SD = 1.55), and many (73%) had worked in support of his campaign (median = 10 hr, M — 35 hr, SD = 85). During the last two weeks of November, follow-up interviews were conducted by telephone with those supporters who had agreed to be contacted (« = 184). A number of individuals could not be reached after six attempts, so 147 supporters (65% of the 227 original respondents) were interviewed by telephone. Preliminary analyses of the initial questionnaires revealed no significant differences between the group of supporters who completed the follow-up telephone interview and those who either did not wish to be contacted or could not be reached for the follow-up interview. Specifically, no differences were found in the demographics of the two groups, the mean length of time the two groups had supported Perot, the mean number of hours spent working for Perot's campaign, emotion ratings, or voting plans. One issue that arises is the extent to which Perot's supporters can be considered to be representative of the general public. Perot captured nearly one in every five popular votes cast in the 1992 presidential election. Nationwide, Perot supporters were found to be surprisingly representative of the public as a whole. Like the present sample, they tended to be primarily Caucasian, from the middle income bracket, and politically moderate. Several polls showed that Perot supporters differed from Clinton and Bush supporters in being more disgruntled with the current political system and more committed to economic and political reform, but no clear picture of their policy preferences emerged (Black & Black, 1994; Zinsmeisler, 1992). As one ex-supporter commented, "Perot was the human instantiation of 'none of die above.' " Those who responded to the initial questionnaire and follow-up interview were a more select sample and probably included many who not only supported Perot but were highly invested in his campaign. Although these potential differences suggest caution when generalizing from the findings, there is no compelling reason to believe that the processes involved in recalling past emotions should differ in this group as compared to other groups.

Materials The initial questionnaire began by asking supporters to describe their level of political involvement in Perot's campaign; namely, whether they had planned to vote for Perot, how long they had supported him, and how many hours they had spent working for his campaign. To remind supporters of their initial experiences following Perot's withdrawal, they were then asked to describe

RECONSTRUCTING MEMORY FOR EMOTIONS when they first heard the news that Perot had withdrawn, the source of the news, and what they were doing at the time. Supporters were then asked the following open-ended questions about their initial reactions to Perot's withdrawal: "On that first day, what were your initial reactions to the news that Perot was no longer pursuing his candidacy?" "How did you feel?" "Why did you feel that way?" Following these open-ended questions, supporters were asked to rate the extent to which they had initially felt surprised, sad, angry, and hopeful on 5-point scales that ranged from "not at all" to "extremely." For sadness, anger, and hope, they were asked why they had felt each emotion, and what they had planned to do as a result. The order in which questions about sadness and anger were listed was counterbalanced, and questions about hope always followed those about the negative emotions. Plans for future political activity were assessed by asking supporters whether they currently planned to vote and for whom. The final section of the questionnaire consisted of demographic questions and asked supporters to note the date on which they completed the questionnaire. In the follow-up interview conducted by telephone in November, supporters were asked whether they had been glad or upset when Perot reentered the race in October, whether they were satisfied with the outcome of the election, whether they wished Perot had been elected, and for whom they had voted. They were also asked to give reasons for their responses. Finally, participants were asked to recall their initial emotional responses to Perot's withdrawal. The exact instructions were as follows; "We're interested in how people recall their responses to significant events in the past. Back in July, when you first learned that Ross Perot had withdrawn from the presidential race, how sad, angry, and hopeful did you feel?" As in the initial questionnaire, participants were asked to rate the intensity of each emotion on a 5-point scale that ranged from "not at all" to "extremely." The order in which sadness and anger were assessed was counterbalanced and matched to the order in which these questions were asked in the initial questionnaire. Ratings for hope were again assessed following the two negative emotions.

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so bad"); (j) goal achieved (e.g., "He shook up the two-party system"); and (k) miscellaneous. A single coding scheme was used to code participants' responses to the three open-ended questions in the follow-up interview in November: reasons for satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the outcome of the elections, attitude toward's Perot's reentry into the race, and reasons for choosing to vote for a particular candidate. These responses were coded with respect to whether or not they (a) described Perot's failure to be elected as a loss, (b) blamed Perot, and (c) described a past or current wish for Perot's election. Reliability ratings were obtained by having two researchers code 40 questionnaires. The proportion of responses coded identically was .84 for initial reactions, .89 for explanations, and .90 for open-ended questions in the November interview. Disagreements were resolved through discussion.

Results The description of the results is divided into four sections: The first section describes participants' initially reported emotional responses to Perot's withdrawal. The second section describes relations between these emotional responses and participants' initial appraisals of Perot's withdrawal. The third section describes the extent to which participants under- and over-estimated their initial emotional responses when recalling them several months later. The final section examines the relations between the observed biases in emotion recall and changes in participants' appraisals concerning Perot.

Initial Reports of Emotions On the initial questionnaires, supporters rated the extent to which they had felt surprised, sad, angry, and hopeful when they first learned of Perot's withdrawal. These ratings,

Data Coding The categories derived for coding open-ended responses were based on examination of the data and on dimensions of importance in cognitive models of emotion (Levine, 1995; Roseman, 1991; Smith & Lazarus, 1993; Stein & Levine, 1987, 1989; Weiner, 1985). Responses were categorized by coders blind to supporters' ratings of the intensity of sadness, anger, and hope. Responses to single questions often included more than one type of information, so categories were not exclusive. Supporters' initial reactions and their explanations for feelings of sadness, anger, and hope were categorized as follows: (a) emotion words (e.g., sad, furious, disappointed); (b) making sense of event (e.g., "I didn't believe it at first," "disbelief); (c) past goals and beliefs (e.g., "I trusted he would bring good things to the country," "I was so sure that this man was truly sincere"); (d) irrevocable goal failure (e.g., "All hopes for improvement in Washington have been dashed," "Hope for change is gone"); (e) negative outcome (e.g., "Now no one outside the system will pursue a high office," "I'll have to vote for the lesser of two evils"); (f) blame Perot (e.g., "He let millions of people down," "He betrayed us," "He wasn't big enough for the job"); (g) blame others (e.g., "Perot was a victim of dirty-game politics," "Government officials threatened his family"); (h) attainment of original goal possible (e.g., "He could still win"); (i) attainment of substitute goal possible (e.g., "Clinton might not be

which were made on 5-point scales ranging from "not at all" to "extremely," showed that Perot's withdrawal had elicited intense surprise and negative affect in his supporters. The mean level of surprise reported was 3.1 (with "3" representing a rating of "very much"), and only 5% of supporters indicated feeling "not at all" surprised. Nearly half of supporters (47%) described themselves as either "extremely" sad, or "extremely" angry, or both. The mean intensity rating for negative emotion, based on the most intense negative emotion rating for each supporter, was 3.00 (SD = 1.15). The mean intensity ratings for individual emotions were 2.58 (SD = 1.34) for sadness, 2.09 (SD = 1.53) for anger, and 0.71 (SD = 1.14)

for hope. Most supporters

(71%) reported feeling more than one emotion at a time (i.e., rated the intensity of more than one emotion as greater than "not at all"), with sadness and anger co-occurring most frequently (44%), followed by the combination of sadness, anger, and hope (17%), sadness and hope (9%), and anger and hope (1%). Of those who reported feeling only one emotion, 16% felt sadness alone, 9% felt anger alone, and 1% felt only hope. A few participants reported feeling none of these emotions (3%).

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Appraisals Associated With Sadness, Anger, and Hope Cognitive models of emotion attempt to specify the types of appraisals associated with particular emotional responses to events. According to several models, sadness is associated with appraisals of a loss as irrevocable (Levine, 1995; Scherer, 1984; Smith & Lazarus, 1993; Stein & Levine, 1987, 1989). Anger is associated with attributions of responsibility or blame to another person for the failure of a goal (e.g., Averill, 1982; Smith & Lazarus, 1993; Weiner, 1985). Hope is associated with the belief that goals may yet be attained in the future (e.g., Levine, 1996; Ortony, Clore, & Collins, 1988; Roseman, 1991). To test these hypotheses, Pearson correlation analyses were conducted to assess the degree of association between the intensity of initial reports of sadness, anger, and hope, and the presence or absence of each type of appraisal described by supporters (e.g., making sense of the event, past goals or beliefs, irrevocable goal failure). An appraisal was counted as "present" if supporters included it in their descriptions of their initial reactions or in their explanations for any emotion (that is, as a reason for feeling sadness, anger, or hope). An appraisal was counted as "absent" if it was never mentioned. The results showed that the appraisals associated with supporters' initial reports of sadness, anger, and hope corresponded quite closely to the predictions of cognitive models of emotion. Significant positive correlations were found between the intensity of sadness and describing Perot's withdrawal as an irrevocable loss (e.g., "I felt as though there had been a death in the family," "All hopes for improvement in Washington have been dashed"), r(198) = 0.30, p < .0001, between the intensity of anger and blaming Perot (e.g., "He betrayed us," "He wasn't willing to pay the price," "Coward"), r(193) = 0.41, p < .0001, and between the intensity of hope and the belief that Perot might yet be elected, r(165) = 0.50, p < .0001. In addition, anger was found to be negatively correlated with the belief that Perot might still be elected, r(\93) = -0.21, p < .01. No other appraisals were significantly correlated with emotional intensity.1

Recall of Initial Emotions After the Election The next set of analyses were conducted to assess whether supporters accurately recalled the types of emotions that they had initially reported feeling. Table 1 shows whether sadness, anger, and hope were present (i.e., intensity was rated as greater than "not at all") in initial reports, and whether or not these emotions were recalled after the elections. Chi-square analyses revealed a significant relationship between initial reports and later recall for all three emotions. For example, of those who initially reported feeling sad, 82% recalled having felt that way in November; 68% of those who initially reported feeling angry recalled these feelings; and 60% of supporters recalled their initial feelings of hope. For those supporters who had initially reported feeling

Table 1 Number of Participants Initially Reporting, and Later Recalling, Feelings of Sadness, Anger, and Hope Recalled emotion Initial report Sadness Present Absent Anger Present Absent Hope Present Absent

Present

Absent

^(1, N = 147)

p