Dread

What it is

In George Loewenstein's 1987 survey the pattern reverses cleanly against the money items: people said they would pay most to avoid the most distant electric shock rather than the nearest one, with willingness to pay rising steadily out to ten years. The design was thirty undergraduates answering hypothetically, and no voltage is given here because the running text and the appendix table of that paper disagree. The measured version arrived later. Gregory Berns and colleagues' imaging work on people waiting for a cutaneous shock found that some dreaded the outcome so much that, given the choice, they preferred to receive more voltage rather than wait, and that extreme dreaders were distinguishable from mild ones by the rate of increase of activity in posterior parts of the cortical pain matrix, which the authors read as dread deriving partly from attention devoted to the expected physical response rather than simply from fear or anxiety.

In effect

The shape is more structured than a single dial allows. Giles Story and colleagues had people choose between painful shocks at delays of minutes and hypothetical dental appointments at delays of months, and recovered a function rather than a slope: future pain becomes more aversive as delay grows, but at a decreasing rate, consistent with moment-by-moment dread accumulating up to the expected event. For a minority, pain has its maximum negative value at an intermediate delay. Framing an outcome as relief reduces the overall preference to get it over with, so the quantity is frameable as well as measurable.

What it does not say

It does not say the foreseeing is worse than the event. Kate Sweeny and Angelica Falkenstein compared awaiting bad news with receiving it, including law graduates awaiting bar results they went on to fail, and found anxiety higher in anticipation while anger, disappointment, low mood and regret were all more intense after the news. Their own conclusion is that whether waiting is the hardest part depends on which of those you would rather have, so you suffer twice survives and the foreseeing is the worse of the two does not. The evidential limits are real: the 1987 result is thirty undergraduates on hypothetical items, the sample size, voltages and choice paradigm of the imaging study are not available to us, and a correction to the Story paper was published in 2014 and has not been retrieved, so no number from it should be cited until it has.

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