It Works Out in the "End"

There are moments when I regard experimental psychologists with nothing less than pure, green, ugly jealousy.  Some of these ingenious experiments sound like so much fun—and to get paid in the process!   Where do I sign up?

Then there are those moments where I am glad I studied theology.  

For example, Donald Redelmeier and Daniel Kahneman subjected 682 patients to a randomized studied involving the duration of their colonoscopies.  Subjects were randomly assigned either the normal procedure or one that lasted one minute longer than normal.  The extra minute didn’t involve anything else, and the colonoscope didn’t move during that final sixty seconds.  The researchers reported their results in an article titled “Patients’ memories of painful medical treatments: real-time and retrospective evaluations of two minimally invasive procedures.”

Nice.

The aggregate discomfort for the longer group was greater.  The final experience, however, was less uncomfortable for them.  Therefore the experience ended on a higher note for the randomly selected subjects.  Those subjects reported a greater willingness to undergo the procedure again in the future than did those who had the normal-length procedure.  You can read the report of that study at http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~jbt/224/Redelmeier_Kahneman_96.pdf.

Our experiences of moment-to-moment happiness are wildly subjective and can be changed by all sorts of influences.  If you want to have a happy memory of your colonoscopy, for example, make sure that the end (terrible pun intended) of the experience is the least painful part of the whole deal.  If you are in the colonoscopic biz and you want to increase the number of repeat customers, then replicate the experiment and watch the satisfied customers go in and out the door.

Well, not really…perhaps.  The cynic in me wonders how this information has been used clinically.  Nonetheless, if we want to improve the subjective quality of an experience, we should pay close attention to how that experience ends.  That ending will have a major impact on the participant evaluations of that experience.

Here’s a trivial example, but an accurate one.  We can have a rollicking good time at Sunday worship (honest, we really can).  But pick a slow, somber, mournful hymn for the closing song, and that will be the majority remembrance of the entire service.  I learned a long time ago that whenever possible, you want to send them out with toes tapping and fingers snapping (which reduces significantly the number of usable exit hymns in most Christian hymnals).

Here’s a nontrivial example.  Having a loved one die is a terrible experience—whether that passing is slow and tortuous or quick and shocking.  By definition, this is the last experience (at least in this life) we have with our loved one—whether in person or at a distance.  That experience of loss will color, at least for a while, all our recollections of life with that loved one.  The ending shapes our remembrance of the rest of the story.

So it’s no wonder that it takes a while for the good memories to resurface.  As time passes, the effects of that ending experience begin to wear off.  The positive images of the past begin to resurface in our memories and our hearts.  The calendar and the clock have a way of shaving that bad ending away, at least for most of us, and leaving the love, joy and happiness with us.

We can work at that process, of course, by what we choose to remember and how.  In a future post I’ll talk about rumination and how to overcome that destructive thinking process.