Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Texas A&M University.
Department of Psychological Science, University of California, Irvine.
J Pers Soc Psychol. 2019 May;116(5):724-742. doi: 10.1037/pspa0000143. Epub 2019 Jan 3.
People try to make decisions that will improve their lives and make them happy, and to do so, they rely on affective forecasts-predictions about how future outcomes will make them feel. Decades of research suggest that people are poor at predicting how they will feel and that they commonly overestimate the impact that future events will have on their emotions. Recent work reveals considerable variability in forecasting accuracy. This investigation tested a model of affective forecasting that captures this variability in bias by differentiating emotional intensity, emotional frequency, and mood. Two field studies examined affective forecasting in college students receiving grades on a midterm exam (Study 1, N = 643), and U.S. citizens after the outcome of the 2016 presidential election (Study 2, N = 706). Consistent with the proposed model, participants were more accurate in forecasting the intensity of their emotion and less accurate in forecasting emotion frequency and mood. Overestimation of the effect of the event on mood increased over time since the event. Three experimental studies examined mechanisms that contribute to differential forecasting accuracy. Biases in forecasting intensity were caused by changes in perceived event importance; biases in forecasting frequency of emotion were caused by changes in the frequency of thinking about the event. This is the first direct evidence mapping out strengths and weaknesses for different types of affective forecasts and the factors that contribute to this pattern. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).
人们试图做出能够改善生活并使他们感到幸福的决策，为此，他们依赖情感预测——对未来结果将如何影响他们的感受的预测。数十年来的研究表明，人们不擅长预测自己的感受，并且常常高估未来事件对情绪的影响。最近的研究揭示了预测准确性的相当大的可变性。这项研究检验了一种情感预测模型，该模型通过区分情感强度、情感频率和情绪来捕捉偏差的可变性。两项现场研究在接受期中考试成绩的大学生中考察了情感预测（研究 1，N=643），以及美国公民在 2016 年总统选举结果之后（研究 2，N=706）。与提出的模型一致，参与者在预测情绪强度方面更准确，在预测情绪频率和情绪方面则不太准确。自事件发生以来，对事件对情绪的影响的高估随着时间的推移而增加。三项实验研究考察了导致不同预测准确性的机制。对事件重要性的感知变化导致预测强度的偏差；对事件思考频率的变化导致预测情绪频率的偏差。这是首次直接证据，描绘了不同类型的情感预测的优势和劣势，以及导致这种模式的因素。（PsycINFO 数据库记录（c）2019 APA，保留所有权利）。
