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Cited by 476

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 10 of the 10 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

The Pleasures of Uncertainty: Prolonging Positive Moods in Ways People Do Not Anticipate.

Wilson, Timothy D., Centerbar, David B., Kermer, Deborah A., Gilbert, Daniel T.·2005·Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

Abstract

The authors hypothesized that uncertainty following a positive event prolongs the pleasure it causes and that people are generally unaware of this effect of uncertainty. In 3 experimental settings, people experienced a positive event (e.g., received an unexpected gift of a dollar coin attached to an index card) under conditions of certainty or uncertainty (e.g., it was easy or difficult to make sense of the text on the card). As predicted, people's positive moods lasted longer in the uncertain conditions. The results were consistent with a pleasure paradox, whereby the cognitive processes used to make sense of positive events reduce the pleasure people obtain from them. Forecasters seemed unaware of this paradox; they overwhelmingly preferred to be in the certain conditions and tended to predict that they would be in better moods in these conditions.

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Metadata

Authors
Wilson, T. D., Centerbar, D. B., Kermer, D. A., & Gilbert, D. T.
Venue
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
Published
2005
Volume
88
Issue
1
Pages
5-21
ISSN
  • 0022-3514 (ISSN-L)
  • 1939-1315
OpenAlex
W2163820843
Cited by
476
References
10
FWCI
31.40
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: The Pleasures of Uncertainty: Prolonging Positive Moods in Ways People Do Not Anticipate. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1037/0022-3514.88.1.5
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Wilson, T. D., Centerbar, D. B., Kermer, D. A., & Gilbert, D. T. (2005). The Pleasures of Uncertainty: Prolonging Positive Moods in Ways People Do Not Anticipate. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.88.1.5

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.