To navigate the social world, people need to be able to anticipate how others will think and feel. Whether in competition or cooperation, you're better off if you can predict other people's emotions and tailor your behavior appropriately. Fortunately, the world makes this possible: there are many features such as situations, personalities, and actions that can help us predict other people's mental states. Here we focus on one such feature: other people's current mental state. If you know how someone is currently feeling, there's good reason to hope that you can predict how they're going to feel next. The current study assesses participants' accuracy in making these emotion-to-emotion predictions.

The task you will engage in consists of rating the probabilities of transitions from one emotion to another. On each trial you will view the name of a mental state, such as "happy" and be asked to rate how likely it is that someone currently feeling this way will next feel another state, such as "tired." Sometimes you will rate how likely an emotion is to "transition" back to itself. In such cases you should rate how often people stay in that emotion over longer periods of time. At the end of the study, you will receive personalized feedback about the degree to which your ratings match up with estimates of the actual transitional probabilities between these emotions, which we measured using separate data. You will be able to see which specific transitions you were more or less accurate about, as well as your overall accuracy. If you wish to participate in this study on emotion prediction, please click the 'begin' button below.