Affective Forcasting and Impact Bias

Predicting how life changes will affect our happiness.  People are not very good at anticipating the actual impact of life events.  The study of people's predictions about the emotional effects of future life events is called affective forecasting.  People consistently overestimate the impact of both positive and negative events.  To evaluate the accuracy of an affective forecast, an individual's predictions about the emotional impact of specific events are compared to the real life reactions of people who actually experience those events.  Predicted impact typically exaggerates both the intensity and duration of people's actual emotional reactions.  This exaggeration in the strength and duration of anticipated emotional reactions is called the impact bias (Baumgardner and Crothers, 2009).