Affect in Social Thinking and Behavior (Frontiers of Social Psychology) by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780203720752
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2012-12-05T14:00:00+00:00

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Affective Forecasting: A User’s Guide to Emotional Time Travel

ELIZABETH W. DUNN and SIMON M. LAHAM

Human beings possess a unique ability to engage in emotional time travel, mentally fast forwarding through time to envision how much they will love their spouse 5 years later or how much they will enjoy a hot fudge sundae next Thursday. Emotional time travel is not without its pitfalls, however, as recent research has documented (e.g., Gilbert & Wilson, 2000). At the most obvious level, people may make inaccurate predictions about how they will feel in a situation because the situation unfolds differently than they expect. For example, if a vacationer imagines a week of swimming and surfing in Australia and arrives to find the beaches swarming with man-eating sharks and deadly jellyfish, her actual emotional experiences during the vacation are likely to diverge sharply from her original expectations. Yet, even if the situation people experience objectively matches the situation they imagined, people face a fundamentally different psychological situation when they experience an event than when they imagine it. The failure to recognize this basic point begets a wide variety of affective fore-casting errors. Following a brief review of common forecasting errors, the present chapter addresses six major questions regarding the processes and consequences of emotional time travel.

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