How do you feel now? On the perceptual distortion of extremely recent changes in anger

•We examine affect-based retrospective biases for extremely recent events.•We show that people show systematic biases in assessment of recent changes in anger.•We provide insight into revenge and its relation to in-group dynamics.

Previous research on retrospective biases in emotion has been largely concerned with mistakes that are made when people are asked to recall temporally distant affective experiences (e.g. those that occurred weeks or months ago). However, far less is known about people's abilities to accurately track extremely recent shifts in affective experience. Across three experiments, we show that people consistently distort perception of a very recent change in anger after being reminded of a historical act of revenge (i.e. the assassination of Osama bin Laden). Consistent with the implications of the “revenge paradox” (Carlsmith, Wilson, & Gilbert, 2008) these reminders made participants more angry. However, participants believed that this act of revenge had made them less angry—the exact opposite of what happened—provided that their psychological allegiance to the ingroup had been primed. We discuss the implications of our findings in previous research on the interconnections between emotional experience and social categorization processes (Mackie, Maimer, & Smith, 2009), as well as the role of revenge in protecting the interests of the ingroup (Fehr & Gachter, 2002).