Combining experiences over time: the effects of duration, intensity changes and on-line measurements on retrospective pain evaluations

Abstract

Two experiments were conducted to examine the effects of various factors on retrospective pain evaluation. The factors examined in Experiment 1 were the rate and pattern of change, the intensity (particularly the final intensity), and the duration of the painful experience. Experiment 2 manipulated these factors and, in addition, examined the effect of continuous (on‐line) ratings on the overall retrospective evaluation. The two experiments utilized different pain modalities, heat in the first and mechanical pressure in the second. In addition, all subjects in Experiment 1 experienced stimuli with the same physical magnitude, while in Experiment 2 stimuli were individually tailored to make them subjectively equivalent. In both experiments, subjects were presented with a series of painful stimuli and evaluated the intensity of each stimulus immediately upon its termination. The stimuli themselves were composed of multiple intensity levels that differentially changed over time (Intensity‐Patterns). Subjects' on‐line ratings in Experiment 2 closely mirrored the physical patterns of the intensities. The main conclusion from both experiments is that the retrospective evaluations of painful experiences are influenced primarily by a combination of the final pain intensity and the intensity trend during the latter half of the experience. In addition, results indicated that duration has little impact on retrospective evaluations for stimuli of relatively constant intensity. However, when the stimulus intensity changes over time, duration does play a role. Finally, the task of continuously reporting the stimulus intensity had a moderating impact on the retrospective evaluations. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The Feeling of Music Past: How Listeners Remember Musical Affect

“…Participants exhibited duration neglect. However, the current data do not support Ariely's (1998) argument: that duration neglect is markedly attenuated for heterogeneous stimuli such as classical and popular music as opposed to for homogeneous stimuli such as ice water. The peak value of momentary intensity and the end value both significantly influence listeners' retrospective judgments of music.…”

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“…Figure 4 presents mean evaluations of the four patterned stimuli: up, down, up–down and down–up, separately for each of the four experiments. Consistent with past findings (Ariely, 1998; Loewenstein & Prelec, 1993), sequences that ended with an improving slope (down and up–down) were rated more favorably than those that ended with a worsening trend of noise (up and down–up). Supporting our third prediction, elimination of conversational norms (Experiment 2), scale-norming (Experiment 3), or both (Experiment 4) did not change the taste for improvement significantly.…”