Anticipation has been described as “emotional rehearsal for possible future situations”. At the moment I am emotionally rehearsing for a holiday to Iceland, getting excited by imagining floating lumps of ice in frozen lakes and exploding geysers.

Research into anticipation shows that we get more excited about picturing a future experience than anticipating a future material purchase. People feel less excited about waiting to receive a shiny thing they have bought than waiting to have an experience they have paid roughly the same amount for.

Studies also suggest that we get more intense feelings of pleasure from anticipating something than we do reminiscing about the same event. The same is also true for negative experiences: our anticipation of them is worse than our recollection of them. Van Boven and Ashworth showed just this in 2007, by devising a series of five experiments, asking people for their recollections and their anticipations of a diverse range of experiences, including a hypothetical skiing holiday, an annoying noise, and menstruation. People’s feelings before all of the events were reported as stronger than their feelings afterwards.

In a similar vein, a classic experiment from the eighties by Loewenstein showed that people were willing to pay three times as much to kiss their favourite celebrity if it was three days in the future, instead of immediately, suggesting they wanted to be able to savour the anticipation of the snog as well as the snog itself.

These studies highlight how much more fun we can get out of doing things than buying things, and they also make me think about the virtue of advance planning. If we can see a positive experience coming towards us from over the horizon then we can squeeze even more pleasure out of it than if it takes us by surprise. It might be worth booking a few more holidays in for next year.