From the SLD forums:
I hoped it [the Shangri-La Diet] will work but still surprised it really does! . . . I had a piece of chocolate in the afternoon but not as much as normal.
Nicely put. I feel the same way — hopeful but still a little surprised. Hope and surprise go together. If you were sure something was going to happen, you wouldn’t hope for it, you’d expect it.
Curiously, hoping for something is more pleasant than expecting it. Compare “I hope to get a sweater for my birthday” and “I expect to get a sweater for my birthday.”
And, I think, the fact is that most of us who have dieted over and over and over again for years are well trained to “hope but not expect.” We hope WW will work; we hope Atkins will work; we hope the weight will stay off. As I wrote in my own SLD blog about Pavlovian responses, just waking up one day to find that you are not physically hungry at all doesn’t quite change how you think about it. Suddenly finding an AS that works does not translate into that we expect it will work. Personally, I’m being very cagey about the possibility that I might lose weight because I cannot bring myself to expect it.
But hope? Oh yes, I hope. I dream, I hope, and I wait…
I think “hope is more pleasureable than expectation” is tied to a kind of reverse “ordinization”, which has to do with how emotionally charged events become familiar over time lose their emotional charge. Timothy Wilson and others write about how after something good or bad happens to us, the consequences are smaller than we expect, because they become familiar to the mind and lose their charge. Life goes on. In looking to the future, the familiar — the expected — also has less emotional charge.
Interesting: Do we dread the expected? Yes, but there is always in the dread an awareness that it might be terrible and not just bad. What is the opposite of dreading the expected?
There are researchers claiming that negative emotions have more charge than positive for humans. The worst that can happen to us may be death or being tortured — but is there anything positive that has a charge as strong as negative as those do?