Memory forms the input for future behavior. Therefore, how individuals remember a certain experience may be just as important as the experience itself. The peak-and-end-rule (PE-rule) postulates that remembered experiences are best predicted by the peak emotional valence and the emotional valence at the end of an experience in the here and now. The PE-rule, however, has mostly been assessed in experimental paradigms that induce relatively simple, one-dimensional experiences (e.g. experienced pain in a clinical setting). This hampers generalizations of the PE-rule to the experiences in everyday life. This paper evaluates the generalizability of the PE-rule to more complex and heterogeneous experiences by examining the PE-rule in a virtual reality (VR) experience, as VR combines improved ecological validity with rigorous experimental control. Findings indicate that for more complex and heterogeneous experiences, peak and end emotional valence are inferior to other measures (such as averaged valence and arousal ratings over the entire experiential episode) in predicting remembered experience. These findings suggest that the PE-rule cannot be generalized to ecologically more valid experiential episodes.
The leisure industry is an economy of experiences. As a leisure or tourism organisation you want the experience you are offering to be remembered, so visitors share the experience with friends or want to relive it once again. In other words, the experience should be memorable.During an experience (a holiday, a visit to an attraction park or museum), all sorts of emotions are being experienced. The flux of these emotions (strong to weak) is a contributing factor as to how people remember an experience. If there is no emotion involved in an experience, it is likely be forgotten soon.This PhD research explores how exactly emotions contribute to the memorability of experiences, and what pattern of emotions influences it. To be able to measure emotions, state-of-the-art research methods are used from the Experience Lab, such as brain research (EEG) and skin conductance.
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