When expectations are not met within an anticipated time frame, worries pour in to occupy the vacuum. For most part, anticipations have Poisson distributions which are tilted in the direction of increased worry! Empirically, modes of such anticipatory curves reside increasingly towards the tail of these distributions. This is partially due to our natural predisposition to overestimate the expected timing (mean of Poisson-like anticipatory probability distributions) of occurrence of events that are of grave importance to us.
Engaging in alternative activities while anticipating future events can effectively provide the necessary adjustment to mean. One of such activities is writing!
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I'm thinking again about expectations (as when I expect you to treat me in certain ways based on our friendship history). My expectations are nothing more than 'the most likely scenario' under my belief system. And my belief system is just an internal model (literally inside of my brain) of the way I perceive of myself and the way I conceive of you and our relationship (shared memories and how those affect your loyalty towards me, which in turn, places certain constrains on the extend you are willing to go out of your way to adhere to your moral codes in relationship to me, and the way in the past you reacted to certain events). Now, my belief system leads me to expect certain behaviors from you and the more your behavior deviates from my expectations the more disappointed I become.
However, there are more than one way that my prediction of your behavior can go wrong:
It can be the case that my belief system was wrong. That could stem from me being a naïve, too self-assured, or a narcissist person.
On the hand, it can equally be the case that you are erratic and inconsistent across your behavioral states, which results from you being a liar, a irresponsible person, or a timid individual.
So, there are multiple ways that my belief system could fail to deliver a correct prediction of your behavior. And in fact, we constantly update our belief systems with respect to each other based on a number of social, emotional, and logical cues that we receive from our interactions with the society and ourselves. For example, when I give you a flower I get a positive point. When a particular trend is socially considered ‘cool’ and I’m not keeping up with that I might lose a point or half.
Now, let’s say I expect you to be home at 10pm every night. If you show up at 10:05 then it’s still okay. However, the later you come home the more worry I become, and subsequently, I will demand more explanations from you. That is because your behavior deviated from my prediction greatly and I need a great deal of information to make necessary adjustments to my belief system. But, we notice that expectations have temporal dependencies. (In general, expectations have spatial dependencies as well. But, in this case we fixed a location (home) and only deal with the temporal component.) And that’s one place where people deviate from each other greatly; for some people being 10 minutes late is a big deal and still some people can tolerate many more minutes before they show the first signs of worry.
In summary, when expectations are not met within an anticipated time frame, worries pour in to occupy the vacuum and to place us in an inquisitive mode so that we can make adjustments to our belief system upon the arrival of new information. Can our knowledge of this process help us in stress and relationship management? What are the factors that shape our expectations as a function of time (and possibly other variables) and how can we manipulate them to our advantage (there is no reason to expect that the natural update dynamics of our belief system is optimal)? How is it related to how tolerant of others we are? Can we educate a new generation of individuals who think more probabilistically about their expectations and, in general, their belief systems and what would be the social consequences of this educational system?
Worries do place us in an inquisitive mode. But, they also stem from worrisome memories that are associated with similar situations. For instance, when your wife is late you might wonder if she had an accident. Then, the hormonal rushes are simply the result of emotions associated with accident imagery. So, there is this interaction between deviations from expectations and a simultaneous attempt by your brain to explain the deviation via all available past memories.
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