Challenges in the care of rare vascular liver diseases: Insights from patients, health care providers, and patient organizations.

Our affective experiences, consisting of both fleeting, momentary emotional states and longer-term affective states (LTAS; including moods; ), color our everyday life. Folk psychology intuition suggests that intense emotional reactions can persist long after the emotion eliciting event has concluded, influencing subsequent, longer-lasting affective states. For example, an individual may receive unexpected, good news. This surprising outcome, followed by a surge of happiness and excitement may last for a relatively short period, perhaps hours. Intuitively, this experience can also lead to a more positive LTAS, persisting for days or even weeks after the initial surge of happiness has faded. These short-term (emotions) and longer-term (moods) affective states have at times been conceptualized as distinct phenomena – differentiated primarily by their timescale and whether there was a clear precipitating event (; Verduyn, 2021). However, there is limited empirical work addressing the degree to which short-term emotional reactions influence longer-term affective reactions (). Within affective science, emotions have typically been defined as momentary affective states arising from specific events, and appraised as personally relevant (; ; ). Emotional responses can differ in duration based upon the salience of the eliciting affective event (Frijda et al., 1986; ), with salient events causing emotional episodes lasting up to several hours (, ; ; ; ; ). Laboratory studies of affect tend to use short video clips (), points in games (), or monetary compensation () to elicit emotion. While these methods are sufficient to examine fleeting emotional responses on the order of seconds, personally meaningful affective events may be necessary to study the degree to which shorter-term affective states influence LTASs (). Real-world emotional experiences are driven by both the intensity (i.e., outcome value) of an event as well as how surprising an event is (). The more intense or valuable an outcome is, the stronger emotional reaction it may induce. For example, people rate that they would feel better receiving a raise of $1,500 as compared to $1,000 (). Further, the positive emotion induced by this hypothetical raise is escalated when the reward is unexpectedly good – a so-called prediction error (PE). For instance, earning a raise of $1,500 feels even better if one originally expected to receive only a $1,000 raise. Indeed, research using computational modeling suggests that emotions are driven by PEs (). Work from our lab using naturalistic, event-triggered ecological momentary assessment (EMA) in high-stakes exam contexts also highlights the importance of PEs in driving longer lasting emotional responses up to several hours ().