ST4 - Affective forecasting

Question 1

What are affective forecasts?

Answer 1

Predictions about their emotional reactions to future events

Question 2

What is the impact bias?

Answer 2

Overestimating the intensity and duration of the emotional reactions, even if people are not in a hot or cold emotional state

Question 3

Why is the impact bias important?

Answer 3

Because people do not only have to predict the valence (positive vs. negative) of their emotional reactions, but also intensity and duration when making a decision

Question 4

What are two main causes for the impact bias?

Answer 4

1. Focalism
2. We fail to recognize how fast we will make sense of new unexpected events and adapt

Question 5

What is focalism?

Answer 5

The tendency to overstimate how events impact us in the future and to underestimate how other events will influence us/our feelings

Question 6

What processes are triggered by new, unexpected events?

Answer 6

1. Attention (a students receives an A that he didn’t expect – he thinks of little else)
2. Reaction (student feels overjoyed)
3. Explanation (student searches for reasons why she received such a good grade)
4. Adaption (once the student has explained the reasons for her success, she will think about her achievement less and experience less happiness)

Question 7

What is the pleasure paradox?

Answer 7

people work to understand events so that they can repeat the good ones and avoid the bad ones, but in understanding these events they reduce their ability to be moved by them

Question 8

What does focusing on an event mean for people?

Answer 8

Things are rarely as good or bad as people expect them to be because people do not realize that by explaining the things that happen to them, they drain these things of the hedonic qualities (ansprechend) that caused them to focus on the events in the first place.

Question 9

What kind of sense making do people use to recover from negative emotional events?

Answer 9

Coping, psychological defenses, and rationalization

Question 10

What is immune neglect?

Answer 10

Not taking into account unconscious defenses when predicting future emotional reactions (such as unconsciously making an ex seem less suitable)

Question 11

What is an example of rationalization?

Answer 11

participants less upset 10 minutes after a failed interview if it was just one interviewer (this guy was a jerk) then a team of interviewers (how could they all dislike me)

Question 12

What are key consequences of immune neglect?

Answer 12

1. They attribute their resilience to events to benevolent external agents
2. People are often happier with irreversible choices because unconsciously they rationalize it more to avoid feeling of failure
3. People believe major traumas to have a stronger impact. However, minor traumas can sometimes last longer and be more serious because people focus more on making sense of major traumas.