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).

One reason for the impact bias seems to be that when we contemplate the emotional effect of an event, we narrow our attention to that one single event.  Our tendency to restrict our attention to the event in question and ignore the consequences and context of the event is called focalism.  As a result of focalism, we neglect to think about how other aspects of our lives might offset or reduce the emotional impact of an event.  

Another reason for the impact bias is known as immune neglect.  Immune neglect occurs when people do not consider their own resilience when anticipating how they will react to future emotionally charged experiences.  In the case of negative events, we seem to forget the power of our own psychological immune system and our ability to cope, adapt, and perhaps even benefit from bad situations.