Affective forecasting (AF) is the ability to forecast emotional responses for future events, and is important for optimal decision-making and mental health in daily life. Most previous AF studies were conducted using laboratory-based tasks and overlooked the impacts of real-life situations and social interactions. Moreover, few studies have investigated daily AF in people with high social anhedonia. However, empirical findings regarding whether people with high social anhedonia exhibiting impairment in AF are inconsistent.

In order to address these issues, the team of Prof. Raymond Chan from the Neuropsychology and Applied Cognitive Neuroscience (NACN) Laboratory, Institute of Psychology, and his collaborators conducted two studies to examine real-life AF in young healthy adults and individuals with high social anhedonia, adopting experience sampling method.

In Study 1, researchers administered their self-developed APP, namely “Time master”, to 109 young healthy adults. They were instructed to create events that would occur in the future every day for 30 consecutive days and reported the anticipated and experienced emotions for these future events using the "Time Master". In total, the participants created 8,031 events. Linear mixed-effects models showed that participants anticipated and experienced social events as more positive and more arousing than non-social events, but also with larger discrepancy between anticipated and experienced emotions.

Study 2 further examined real-life AF in 28 participants with high social anhedonia and 32 participants with low social anhedonia. All participants reported anticipated and experienced emotions for future events for 14 consecutive days (totaling 2066 real-life events) using another free mobile APP, namely Samply. Findings showed that, compared to participants with low social anhedonia, participants with high social anhedonia anticipated less pleasure and displayed larger valence discrepancy especially for social but not for non-social events. However, they reported less experienced pleasure for both social and non-social events than participants with low social anhedonia.

Together, these findings suggested the impact of social interaction on the anticipated emotions in daily life situations and characterized the AF performances people with high social anhedonia. Such impairments in affective forecasting may serve as a potential intervention target for clinical populations.

This study was supported by the Scientific Foundation of Institute of Psychology and the Philip K. H. Wong Foundation. Associate Professor Rui-ting Zhang from the Department of Psychology, Hunan Normal University (work completed during her doctoral studies at the Institute of Psychology), Master's student Yan Gao from the Institute of Psychology, and Associate Professor Tian-xiao Yang from the Institute of Psychology are the co-first authors. Professor Raymond Chan from the Institute of Psychology is the corresponding author.

This study was online on Feb.5 from Schizophrenia Bulletin Open:

-          Zhang, R. T.#, Gao, Y.#, Yang, T. X.#, Yan, C., Wang, Y., Lui, S. S. Y., Chan, R. C. K*. (2025). Real-life affective forecasting in young adults with high social anhedonia: An experience sampling study. Schizophrenia Bulletin Open.