Affective forecasting
Encyclopedia
Affective forecasting is the forecasting of one's affect
Affect (psychology)
Affect refers to the experience of feeling or emotion. Affect is a key part of the process of an organism's interaction with stimuli. The word also refers sometimes to affect display, which is "a facial, vocal, or gestural behavior that serves as an indicator of affect" .The affective domain...

 (emotion
Emotion
Emotion is a complex psychophysiological experience of an individual's state of mind as interacting with biochemical and environmental influences. In humans, emotion fundamentally involves "physiological arousal, expressive behaviors, and conscious experience." Emotion is associated with mood,...

al state) in the future. This kind of prediction is affected by various kinds of cognitive bias
Cognitive bias
A cognitive bias is a pattern of deviation in judgment that occurs in particular situations. Implicit in the concept of a "pattern of deviation" is a standard of comparison; this may be the judgment of people outside those particular situations, or may be a set of independently verifiable...

es, or systematic errors of thought also known as "empathy gap
Empathy gap
A hot-cold empathy gap is a cognitive bias in which a person underestimates the influences of visceral drives, and instead attributes behavior primarily to other, nonvisceral factors....

" and "impact bias
Impact bias
The impact bias, a form of which is the durability bias, in affective forecasting, is the tendency for people to overestimate the length or the intensity of future feeling states....

".

Examples of the impact bias include over-estimating emotional reactions to Valentine's Day, football games, elections, movie clips and the reactions of juries
Jury
A jury is a sworn body of people convened to render an impartial verdict officially submitted to them by a court, or to set a penalty or judgment. Modern juries tend to be found in courts to ascertain the guilt, or lack thereof, in a crime. In Anglophone jurisdictions, the verdict may be guilty,...

 to criminal
Crime
Crime is the breach of rules or laws for which some governing authority can ultimately prescribe a conviction...

 trial
Trial (law)
In law, a trial is when parties to a dispute come together to present information in a tribunal, a formal setting with the authority to adjudicate claims or disputes. One form of tribunal is a court...

s. Reasons for the impact bias include (a) focalism and (b) immune neglect. In terms of focalism, people focus too much on the target event, ignoring peripheral activities that may later occupy their attention and impact their emotional state. In terms of immune neglect, when forecasting emotions, people tend to neglect the role their coping resources will later play in ameliorating distressing affects. As such, those with effective coping strategies are actually more prone to biased affective forecasts.

Psychological immune system

Gilbert and Wilson coined the term "psychological immune system" to encompass a number of biases
Cognitive bias
A cognitive bias is a pattern of deviation in judgment that occurs in particular situations. Implicit in the concept of a "pattern of deviation" is a standard of comparison; this may be the judgment of people outside those particular situations, or may be a set of independently verifiable...

 and mechanisms that protect the subject from experiencing extreme negative emotion
Emotion
Emotion is a complex psychophysiological experience of an individual's state of mind as interacting with biochemical and environmental influences. In humans, emotion fundamentally involves "physiological arousal, expressive behaviors, and conscious experience." Emotion is associated with mood,...

s. This label draws on an analogy with the biological immune system
Immune system
An immune system is a system of biological structures and processes within an organism that protects against disease by identifying and killing pathogens and tumor cells. It detects a wide variety of agents, from viruses to parasitic worms, and needs to distinguish them from the organism's own...

. These processes affect how the subject processes, transforms or constructs information, making the existing state of affairs more bearable and the alternatives more appealing. The mechanisms of the psychological immune system act without conscious awareness, so people usually fail to anticipate its effects. This is one reason why people are poor at affective forecasting: they typically underestimate the extent to which these processes will shield them from a negative event.

The psychological immune system includes:
  • ego defense
    Defence mechanism
    In Freudian psychoanalytic theory, defence mechanisms are unconscious psychological strategies brought into play by various entities to cope with reality and to maintain self-image. Healthy persons normally use different defences throughout life...

  • rationalization
    Rationalization (psychology)
    In psychology and logic, rationalization is an unconscious defense mechanism in which perceived controversial behaviors or feelings are logically justified and explained in a rational or logical manner in order to avoid any true explanation and made consciously tolerable by plausible means...

  • dissonance reduction
    Cognitive dissonance
    Cognitive dissonance is a discomfort caused by holding conflicting ideas simultaneously. The theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that people have a motivational drive to reduce dissonance. They do this by changing their attitudes, beliefs, and actions. Dissonance is also reduced by justifying,...

  • motivated reasoning
    Hot cognition
    Hot cognition is a motivated reasoning phenomenon in which a person's responses to stimuli are heightened. Hot cognition might be associated with cognitive arousal, in which a person is much more responsive to environmental factors regardless of the response's impact on learning. A learner who...

  • self-serving attribution
    Self-serving bias
    A self-serving bias occurs when people attribute their successes to internal or personal factors but attribute their failures to situational factors beyond their control. The self-serving bias can be seen in the common human tendency to take credit for success but to deny responsibility for failure...

  • self-affirmation
    Self-affirmation
    The theory of self-affirmation is a psychological theory that was first proposed by Claude Steele with the premise that people are motivated to maintain the integrity of the self. The ultimate goal of the self is to protect an image of its self-integrity, morality and adequacy...

  • self-deception
    Self-deception
    Self-deception is a process of denying or rationalizing away the relevance, significance, or importance of opposing evidence and logical argument...

  • terror management
  • Fading affect bias: a bias in which the emotion associated with unpleasant memories fades more quickly than the emotion associated with positive events.

External links

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