Tomorrow you start a new job. Yesterday, after ten years, you met up with a friend from school. Someone close to you said something that hurt more than you want to admit. In moments like these, emotions are as clear as they will ever be. Yet a few months later we remember the facts: where, with whom, at what time. What we felt back then blurs surprisingly quickly.
That's why Games with time now includes Emotional snapshot. In it you write down what happened, how you feel about it and which words you would use to name your emotions. Then the snapshot comes back to you as a letter to the future: in a month, in six months or in a year.
Why emotions blur so quickly
Psychologists have been observing this for years in diary studies. Participants record events and rate their emotions as they happen, then do it again a few months or years later. A clear pattern emerges, known as the fading affect bias: the emotions tied to difficult memories fade faster than those tied to good ones. The facts stay, but their weight lessens.
With the future, we have the opposite problem. Timothy Wilson and Daniel Gilbert described a phenomenon they called the impact bias: when we predict how we'll feel after an event, we usually overestimate how intensely and for how long we'll feel it. Before a job interview, it seems that failing would hurt for months. In reality, sooner than we expect, we make sense of what happened and find our balance again.
We smooth out our memories and exaggerate our forecasts. A record made in the moment shows how it really was.
Name it, and it gets a little lighter
In 2007, Matthew Lieberman's team at UCLA showed participants photos of faces expressing emotions and scanned their brains with magnetic resonance imaging. When participants matched a face with a word naming the emotion, such as “anger” or “fear”, their amygdala, a structure closely linked to emotional reactions, responded less than during other tasks. At the same time, activity rose in the prefrontal cortex, which helps regulate emotions. The researchers called this affect labeling. It was a laboratory study on a small group, but its result fits many later studies: simply naming an emotion gives you a little distance.
How precise the word is matters too. Lisa Feldman Barrett, Todd Kashdan and Patrick McKnight write about emotional granularity. Some people call everything difficult “bad”, while others tell disappointment from loneliness, and tiredness from sadness. In moments of intense stress, the latter are less likely to reach for harmful ways of coping, such as alcohol or aggression. A precise word hints at what you actually need: with tiredness, sleep helps; with loneliness, a conversation.
Then there's writing. Since James Pennebaker's research in the 1980s, we've known that writing about emotional experiences can help. Meta-analyses show that the effect is modest and doesn't work for everyone, but it's a good reason to write something down from time to time.
The emotion map: mood and energy
How do you find the right word? A map with two axes helps. The first is mood, meaning how pleasant or unpleasant what you feel is. The second is energy, meaning how much activation you feel inside. The idea comes from psychologist James Russell (the circumplex model of affect, 1980), and Marc Brackett of Yale turned it into the Mood Meter, a tool used in schools around the world. The map has four colours: yellow (pleasant and high-energy, for example excitement), green (pleasant and calm, for example relief), blue (unpleasant and low-energy, for example sadness) and red (unpleasant and tense, for example anger or fear).
Our version adds a fifth family: mixed feelings. After all, at important moments we feel several things at once, such as joy and jitters before the first day at a new job, or feeling moved and nostalgic after seeing someone again after many years.
How Emotional snapshot works
- What happened? First you mark whether it has already happened, is happening now, or is still ahead of you. Then you describe the event in a few words. You can start from an example: a first day at work or at school, a reunion after many years, love at first sight, an argument, a goodbye or something that moved you deeply.
- Mood and energy. Two five-point scales. Your answers set a point on the emotion map.
- Name your emotions. Based on that point, we suggest words that fit it. Before an important event the suggestions are more often jitters, hope and worry; after it, relief, pride or regret. You choose one to five emotions or type your own word.
- Body and needs. This step is optional: butterflies in the stomach, a lump in the throat, or perhaps a need for quiet or a talk with someone close.
- Forecast and letter. You predict how you'll feel about it when you read the letter, add a note to yourself and pick a date: from a month to 3 years.
The whole thing takes about three minutes. Only you see the letter: it is never public, and its content goes nowhere except your inbox.
What you'll see when the letter comes back
At the start of the letter, we ask you to rate in your head how you feel about that event today, before you read any further. Only then do you see your snapshot: the event, the point on the map, the emotions you named and your forecast. That's when you can see how much we change over time. Jitters before a first day at work can seem funny six months later. A hurt that kept you awake at night turns out to be smaller. And the joy of seeing a friend again may come back just as strongly.
If you like, take a new snapshot of the same event and compare the two.
Start with one event
It doesn't have to be anything big. It can be an ordinary day you want to remember, or a conversation you keep thinking about. Take your emotional snapshot, and in a few months you'll read what you felt back then. And if you enjoy questions worth answering twice, take a look at the What matters set.
Emotional snapshot is a game and a tool for reflection, not a diagnosis or therapy. If things are very hard for you, talk to someone you trust or call a helpline in your country; you'll find a list at findahelpline.com. If your life is in danger, call your local emergency number.