ABSTRACT
Plutchik (1962) insightfully identified “anticipation” (which he also called “expectation”) as one of eight primary emotions, and noted that its functional aspect is the “exploration” of territory and resources. Consistent with Plutchik’s conceptualization, this chapter places the positively valenced emotion anticipation in a socioevolutionary context of market-oriented social relationships. It shows anticipation’s linkage to the human development of natural-history intelligence, and locates its biological infrastructure in Panksepp’s (1998) “seeking system”. Anticipation is a forward-looking sense of expectation toward some envisioned future state of affairs, situation, or event that one foresees and mentally prepares for, and that will therefore not be surprising. Anticipation, as an emotion, includes both strong cognitive and behavioral components. As an emotion, anticipation is experienced as a sense of openly looking forward to some future event(s) with a sense of positive expectancy, which usually stimulates pleasurable feeling of what one might find, consume, or experience. Cognitively, anticipation means precognition, presentiment, intuitive preconception, prediction, or prior knowledge of some future event, occurrence, or state of affairs based on one’s models of the external natural environment and of the social world (gained from past experience); it can include the adoption of a proactive stance toward predicted future states and situations. Anticipation can thus involve planning a future course of action in response to the future event(s), or taking steps to ward off, forestall, amend, or control the expected future. Plutchik emphasizes that anticipation is linked to purposive exploration of the environment and social world. Evidence shows that humans develop a positive expectation of encountering things of value in the environment, or potential resources, and that the emotional experience of awaiting, or looking forward to acquiring, these resources motivates search activity and the related desire to understand nature and the social world.
