Expectation occupies a pivotal position across multiple registers of depth-psychological and neuroscientific discourse gathered in this corpus. At its most fundamental, expectation designates the anticipatory structure that the organism projects onto incoming experience — a predictive scaffolding that either confirms, modifies, or shatters itself against reality. In the neuroscientific literature, Schultz's dopamine reward prediction-error framework renders expectation as a quantifiable signal whose violation (the prediction error) drives learning, motivation, and, potentially, addiction. Barrett's constructionist neuroscience extends this into a thoroughgoing theory of mind: the brain is constitutively predictive, and every perception, emotion, and concept is an expectation tested against sensory input. In the Jungian lineage, expectation appears in a more charged register: Samuels and Hillman both invoke archetypal expectation — the innate anticipatory demand the psyche brings to developmental experience — whose frustration produces pathology. Schore, approaching from developmental neuroscience, shows how misattunement violates the infant's expectation of affective resonance, producing shame and narcissistic injury. Von Franz and Hillman characterize inferior feeling as a structure of massive, undifferentiated expectation laden with resentment. The tension between neurobiological precision and depth-psychological depth animates the most interesting treatments of this term: expectation is simultaneously a computational signal, a developmental demand, an archetypal claim, and a source of suffering when reality fails to comply.
In the library
13 passages
I had the firm expectation of my preferred blackcurrant juice but, unpleasant surprise, the can that came out was not the one I preferred. I experienced a negative prediction error, the difference between the nonpreferred, lower valued can and the expected preferred
Schultz grounds expectation in the dopamine reward prediction-error framework, defining it as a quantified anticipation whose violation constitutes a negative prediction error that recalibrates behavior and learning.
we find ourselves with huge claims for love, with massive needs for recognition, and discover our feeling connection to life to be one vast expectation composed of thousands of tiny angry resentments.
Von Franz and Hillman characterize inferior feeling as a globally undifferentiated expectation fused with repressed anger and omnipotence fantasy, pointing to the psychopathological dimension of unmet archetypal demand.
Marie-Louise von Franz, James Hillman, Lectures on Jung's Typology, 2013thesis
Jung describes the result of an archetypal expectation not being met. In this instance it is an archetypal expectation held by the infant. If personal experience fails to bring about a humanising of the archetypal image, the individual is forced to try to achieve a direct connection to the archetypal structure which underpins the expectation
Samuels articulates the Jungian thesis that archetypal expectations are innate anticipatory demands whose failure of environmental confirmation produces developmental psychopathology.
Samuels, Andrew, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985thesis
the positive dopamine response (activation) to positive prediction errors: the dopamine activation occurs when we get more reward than predicted. But any reward we receive automatically updates the prediction, and the previously larger-than-predicted reward becomes the norm
Schultz argues that expectation is dynamically updated by each reward outcome, such that escalating expectations underlie the perpetual dissatisfaction driving addictive seeking.
Despite an expectation of an attuned mutual amplification of positive affect, the self suddenly experiences a misattunement, triggering a shock-induced psychobiological state transition and a deflation of narcissistic affect.
Schore positions expectation at the core of shame dynamics: the anticipation of affective attunement, when violated, produces a psychobiological collapse that interrupts self-cohesion.
Schore, Allan N., Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self: The Neurobiology of Emotional Development, 1994thesis
your brain is busily issuing thousands of predictions based on your concepts, in milliseconds, all outside of your awareness… You could experience the happiness of seeing your friend, the anticipation that she's about to appear, the fear that she won't arrive
Barrett demonstrates that expectation, as probabilistic prediction, continuously constructs emotional experience before sensory input arrives, underpinning the constructionist theory of emotion.
Barrett, Lisa Feldman, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, 2017supporting
Through prediction, your brain constructs the world you experience… your experience right now was predicted by your brain a moment ago. Prediction is such a fundamental activity of the human brain that some scientists consider it the brain's primary mode of operation.
Barrett establishes prediction — the neural substrate of expectation — as the brain's default operating mode, making expectation constitutive of all experience rather than an occasional mental event.
Barrett, Lisa Feldman, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, 2017supporting
your brain predicted incorrectly based on its stored knowledge of fairy tales — it made a prediction error — and then adjusted its prediction in the blink of an eye based on the final words
Barrett illustrates that violated expectation (prediction error) is not a failure but the adaptive mechanism by which the brain updates its model of the world.
Barrett, Lisa Feldman, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, 2017supporting
you may have embodied this expectation by rounding your shoulders, lowering your head, and having a meek demeanor that goes along with not being allowed to be assertive… These somatic and psychological adaptations can be thought of as survival resources that helped you avoid the disapproval of your attachment figures by trying to meet their expectations.
Ogden argues that familial expectations become somatically inscribed as chronic postural and behavioral patterns, showing how social expectation is metabolized into bodily character structure.
Ogden, Pat, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Interventions for Trauma and, 2015supporting
That future unit… will contain expected feelings, that is, predictions made by internal models of the world and of others' behavior based on heredity and experience. If the present conditions do not match the expected conditions, the dissonance can immediately produce increased salience in the ongoing present moment (e.g., surprise).
Craig's neurobiological model situates expectation as future-oriented quantal storage of predicted feelings, whose mismatch with present conditions generates affective salience through dissonance.
Craig, A.D. Bud, How Do You Feel? An Interoceptive Moment with Your Neurobiological Self, 2014supporting
the fervent eschatological expectation of the earliest community gives way to a period when this expectation undergoes modification, its final extinction. Early catholicism means that transition from earliest Christianity to the so-called ancient Church, which is completed with the disappearance of the imminent expectation.
Thielman traces how eschatological expectation — the communal anticipation of imminent divine fulfillment — structurally shapes religious community and undergoes historically significant transformation when unmet.
Frank S. Thielman, Theology of the New Testament: A Canonical and Synthetic Approach, 2005supporting
the two following present figures which correspond with our expectation. (In Case 1 above recorded the first test also gave a contradictory result.)
Jung notes, in passing, that galvanometric results in association experiments either confirm or contradict experimental expectation, using the term in its methodological rather than psychological sense.