Looking back at anger: Reference periods change the interpretation of emotion frequency questions.

When asked to report on behaviors and experiences, participants draw on the specified reference period to infer the question meaning: Short reference periods suggest that the question pertains to frequent experiences; long reference periods suggest that it pertains to rare ones.Because frequent experiences are typically less intense than rare ones, this meaning shift results in reports of different experiences.Three experiments support this analysis in the domain of emotion reports.Participants asked how frequently they get angry (a) assumed that the question refers to less intense and more frequent episodes when presented with a short (1-week) rather than a long (1-year) reference period, (b) reported more extreme episodes in the latter case, and (c) provided differential frequency reports.These differences reflect conversational inference processes and cannot he fully accounted for by memory search biases.Research participants are often asked to report on their thoughts, behaviors, emotions, and experiences during a specified reference period.Depending on the purpose of the study, the length of the reference period may range from short time spans, such as 1 hr, to more extended time spans, such as a day, a week, a month, or even a year.In choosing a reference period, researchers often take the assumed frequency of the target phenomenon into account (see Sudman & Bradburn, 1983, for a discussion).When the behavior or experience is likely to be relatively infrequent, researchers prefer an extended reference period, or else too many participants may report a nonoccurrence, thus limiting the possible analyses.Conversely, when the behavior or experience is likely to be relatively frequent, researchers prefer shorter reference periods, based on the concern that participants may have forgotten more distant instances of a frequent behavior