The Power of Anticipation

Why We All Need Something To Look Forward To

At Blueboard, we hold one core belief more deeply than any other: Experiences are the best way to recognize your employees.

Our mission at Blueboard is to empower employees to challenge their comfort zones, indulge in their passions, and try new things — and we do that through a menu of hand-curated experiences for rewarded employees to choose from. When people are empowered to live our mission, they’re empowered to live a more meaningful and fulfilling life.

If experiences are “What” we believe in, and fulfilling recognition is our “Why” — then “how” we achieve fulfilling recognition can be defined by this formula:

Over the years we’ve created a methodology for how to design and deliver experiences that solve the 3 main problems with recognition: Lacking awareness, underwhelming appreciation, and disappearing value.

We call this “The Blueboard Method.”

By focusing on these 5 stages — Awareness, appreciation, anticipation, activity, and afterglow — we solve the main shortcomings with recognition and send people on experiences that capture the essence of who they are: unique people with unique motivators.

And it’s more relevant now, than ever.

The circumstances of the current Coronavirus have been described as “weird, unprecedented, crazy, scary, uncertain, and good for belly scratches.” That last one was from my dog Moose who is making the most of the time he has with me at home right now.

While this is a strange time for many people, for businesses — this is pivotal.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has conducted decades of research on how people respond to crises. One consistent trend appears in all that data: people will look to the institutions that provide structure in their life to guide how they should respond.

Inevitably, people are looking for hope, guidance, and leadership from their employers. Blueboard — and specifically, one crucial piece of the Blueboard Method — allows employers to provide much-needed encouragement and hope to employees during a crisis that impartially affects all aspects of their lives.

That crucial piece is the concept of Anticipation.

And for whatever professional expertise I have to offer on the topic of anticipation, I estimate that I have double the personal experience with the sensation.

As a child, I spent every Christmas Eve sleepless. My first day of school outfit was carefully mulled, analyzed, and laid out a week in advance. Sporting events, senior prom, birthdays, graduations — every retrospective moment in my life that feels special has always been accompanied by the feeling that anticipation provides.

And now as our current reality consists of an uncertain world in the midst of a pandemic, I realize the same truth — every bright moment, wonderful surprise, and glimpse of hope these last few months have also been accompanied by anticipation.

The power of anticipation is still here.

But I wanted proof. Proof of the actual science and psychology of anticipation; what it can do for employees, communities of people, and the individual. After immersing myself in the subject, these were my findings.

Anticipation

What is it, Why does it matter, & How to utilize it.

A key essence of anticipation — as seen in the Blueboard method — is that it’s an emotion felt before an activity. This is a prerequisite that’s integral enough to make it an inseparable aspect of how psychologists define anticipation. Anticipation is an emotion involving pleasure in considering some expected or longed-for good event.¹ As with most concepts in psychology, a concept is usually juxtaposed with its inverse — in this case dread, anxiety, or irritation with having to wait. The intent of any psychological endeavor is to describe, explain, predict, and control behavior.¹ For the sake of this endeavor, the anticipation we are describing is the positive stimulus response to an upcoming activity or event.

This positive stimulus forges the foundations of Blueboard’s experiential recognition. The resulting benefits answer why it’s more important than ever to have something to look forward to.

As well-being is the central construct in positive psychology, modern psychologists elucidate how anticipation for the future contributes a necessary addition to this healthy emotional state. Research on anticipatory thinking has shifted the view of present psychological health to a dynamic, future-oriented view of an individual’s well being.²

This shift has ushered in a modern interpretation of two kinds of future-oriented emotions: anticipatory and anticipated.

Each play their role in making it easier to get through difficult, frustrating, and challenging times. Anticipatory emotions involve the prospect of a future event (e.g., hope). Anticipated emotions, on the other hand, are expected to be experienced in the future if certain events do or do not occur (e.g., anticipated joy/optimism).²

Hope and optimism are outcomes of these emotions that — on a fundamental level — produce tangible cognitive effects such as dopamine signaling and goal-directed behavior.

Advanced cognitive studies suggest that these effects might even be necessary to live a truly happy and satisfying life.³

Hope

Hope and anticipation are not two separate sensations but rather complementary psychological tools that need to both persist for the subsequent to exist.³

Simply put, for the anticipation we are discussing and desiring to cultivate — hope has to be prevalent.

Hope and optimism are hallmarks of psychological health.

Hope is a positive feeling and motivational state — a state that intrinsically involves beliefs about the self and one’s own actions as they relate to the attainment of desired outcomes.

Modern research shows that people anticipating positive emotions, in contrast with those who hold negative expectations, engage in a variety of coordinated, adaptive responses to the challenges and opportunities they encounter in life.⁴

People with high hope, as opposed to those with low hope, more often think about different routes to their goals, more fully specify these alternate routes, and more frequently tell themselves that they can and will accomplish their goals.⁴

Optimism

When people expect positive outcomes, they are apt to feel relatively good about their current situation, even if it is a challenging one.

To begin with, negative feelings will be lower: that is, the challenging aspects of a situation will be less frustrating, distressing, and depressing to individuals who expect things to work out alright in the end, as compared with those who hold negative expectations.³

As individuals drop in their expectation of desired outcomes and gain in their expectation of undesired ones, they move from the positive pole, optimism, to the negative pole, pessimism.

Mentioned previously, every psychology concept has an inverse effect that occurs when the healthy psychological construct is ignored. Therefore, the damage is two fold when optimism drops. Not only is there a loss in beneficial anticipatory emotions, but the emotional state swings to the antipodes of optimism — pessimism, despondence, hopelessness.³

Thus, optimism and pessimism share these relevant aspects:

1. Enduring and significant influence on how individuals approach a wide range of situations.
2. Inverse variation on one another’s overall impact. As optimism increases, pessimism decreases — with the reverse being true as well.

The psychological and cognitive components have been examined. As well as why hope and optimism are major influences in a satisfying and happy life.

What’s left is an examination of the utilization and anecdotal evidence of the positive effects of anticipated events.

Evidence

Studies of recovery of trauma surgeries

Several studies have been conducted over the previous decades that point to anticipatory emotions resulting in higher goal-directed effort and attainment, more positive and fewer negative emotions, and increased psychological health — through which they can extend and improve the quality of their lives.⁵

The findings in those studies concluded that anticipatory emotions contain a direct link to psychological adjustment in challenging settings or circumstances of academics, physical health, sport, interpersonal relationships, psychotherapy, and debilitating stressors.⁵

One study related to physical health remarkably found that of patients recovering from trauma surgeries, those with optimistic views of future events (getting to return to a specific activity or favorite hobby) all reported faster recoveries and process.⁵

Applied Psychology, which makes use of psychological studies to solve problems of the human experience, has been making concerted efforts to apply the benefits of anticipatory emotions to the workplace, general health, and cognitive performance.

As evidence continues to grow on the effects of hope, optimism, and anticipation, applied psychologists are beginning to consider the emotional states, not as incremental predictors, but rather intrinsic properties of psychological well-being affecting the holistic quality of life.⁵

Hope in difficult times

Social Indicator researchers Sara Staats and Christies Partlo conducted research on the weekend of the Gulf ground invasion in 1991, and in the recession of 1992 to better understand how hope for the future functions as a cogntive-affective resource. The findings ultimately assess and validate hope as a psychological asset.⁶

Their deduction on anticipatory emotions follow that the importance of this asset becomes greater in times of threat. Further concluding that a need theory of psychological well-being would predict an increase in specific hopes that are driven by needs arising from specific threats. Specifically meaning that hope for the country to be more productive should increase when the productivity of a nation is challenged by recession.⁶

This alludes to the point that hope can be a macro experience where shared wishes and desires align within an entire population. The researchers found that this phenomenon is unique to these historically polarizing events. This being the case, their thesis was confirmed: hope is a primary asset in difficult times.

Neuroscience: Anticipation’s effects on Immediate vs Prolonged Rewards

A recent study conducted for a Neuroscience journal, found that when pathological gamblers were asked to think about a future experience — such as an upcoming vacation — they were better able to curb their impulses and choose long-term gratification over short-term gratification.⁷

The study was intended to demonstrate the potential of using the anticipation of a future situation (especially a pleasurable one) to increase persistence during the present situation. Utilized as a “trigger,” the findings concluded that envisioning a future personal experience reduces preferences for present gratification or intervention.⁷

SPN and future event stimulus

The stimulus-preceding negativity (SPN) is a type of event-related potential (ERP) that reflects processes related to anticipation. It is the cognitive measurement that psychologists employ for measuring overall shift in behavior for future stimuli.⁸

Martha Roberts from Psychology Today, using 15 years of SPN research, found that humans tend to experience more intense emotions about future events than those in the past. This is because, on the whole, people have an expectation that future events will make us feel more emotional than ones that have passed. On top of this, we are also more likely to talk about how excited we are about something we have planned compared to something we have already done.⁹

Robert’s five separate experiments on the subject, indicate that people report more intense emotions during anticipation of, rather than during retrospection about, emotional events that were positive.⁹

Ok, that was a lot. But here’s the gist.

• This pandemic is crazy — among other things.
• Employees are looking to their employers for answers, but most importantly, for anything to look forward to.
• Anticipation, hope, and optimism are essential to remaining psychologically healthy. These emotions are most threatened and necessary during a crisis.
• Anticipated (optimism) and anticipatory (hope) emotions are fundamental for psychological health.
• People who are hopeful and optimistic tend to redouble their efforts and maintain a favorable effective balance when confronted with stressors.
• These emotions promote feelings of happiness, interest, and enthusiasm.
• Blueboard is an employee recognition company that specializes in curating moments and events for people to look forward to. The things that people anticipate most in their lives.

As human beings, we need things in our future to be excited and optimistic about. Blueboard is the recognition tool that can do that now and in the future.

For more information visit blueboard.com or email me at brady@blueboard.com.

[1]: Peterson C, Seligman ME, and Vaillant GE (1988) Pessimistic explanatory style is a risk factor for physical illness: A thirty-five-year longitudinal study. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 55: 23–27.

[2]: Peterson C, Semmel A, Con Baeyer C, Abramsom LY, Metalsky GI, and Seligman MEP (1982) The attributional style questionnaire. Cognitive Therapy and Research 6: 287–300.

[3]: Baumgartner, Hans; Pieters, Rik; Bagozzi, Richard P. (2008). “Future-oriented emotions: conceptualization and behavioral effects.” European Journal of Social Psychology 38(4): 685–696.

[4]: Bailis, Daniel & Chipperfield, Judith. (2012). Hope and optimism.

[5]: Scheier MF and Carver CS (1985) Optimism, coping, and health: Assessment and implications of generalized outcome expectancies. Health Psychology 4: 219–247.

[6]: Sara Staats and Christie Partlo, Social Indicators Research. Vol. 29, No. 2 (Jun., 1993), pp. 229-243

[7]: Society for Neuroscience. “Anticipation helps pathological gamblers hold out for larger-but-later rewards.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 5 June 2017.

[8]: Martha Roberts. (April 8 2014). https://www.psychologies.co.uk/self/life-lab-experiment-mind-2.html