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Changed class to undefined, so it can be defined by the proper Wikiproject Ethulin (talk) 23:54, 26 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, re:separating psychological immune system and affective forecasting. Take a look at my sandbox to see how an expanded affective forecasting article is coming along. It's a work in progress, but I am looking for some feedback about the psychological immune system section. I believe the expansion merits separating these two articles again. I have mentioned the immune system in regards to immune neglect, because it specifically informs affective forecasting, however, other components of the immune system (like terror management) don't have anything to do with affective forecasting. --No23139116 (talk) 21:33, 10 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The quote displaying two sample questions from a study on affective forecasting ("Imagine that one morning...feel that way?") strikes me as randomly placed. Why is it there? It's just floating up there without any contextual information; I'm inclined to remove it.

Also, I'm wondering how others feel about the merging of affective forecasting and the psychological immune system articles. If anything, shouldn't affective forecasting fall under the much wider umbrella of a psychological immune system? Thoughts on separation?

No23139116 (talk) 18:10, 2 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Affective forecasting is an established term used in a wide range of research to refer to a specific thing that people do. "Psychological immune system" is an off-hand term used by one or two researchers (whom I greatly admire!) to refer to a fuzzy collection of different processes. MartinPoulter (talk) 18:20, 2 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I agree, 'affective forecasting' is a more general and better term; 'Psychological immune system' not as much so. I also agree that the sample questions are detailed and out of context and should probably be removed (or at the very least moved and contextualized much better). --Jayzzee (talk) 01:42, 3 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Okay, I see what you're saying about specificity, but I still don't know what the "psychological immune system" construct is doing here. The talk history indicates that the rationale to merge articles was because both were formerly stubs. I'd like to expand affective forecasting—assuming I beef it up, do you think that the psych immune system section should remain as is? No23139116 (talk) 05:35, 3 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I think an affective forecasting page will probably refer to psychological immune system because some of the prominent researchers on this issue use the term. (Because we do not think about the things that help us cope, we over estimate the influence of emotional events.) So, you could keep what's there, but I could also imagine some editing or cutting. Right now the balance seems quite off --I think that 'immune system' should be a much smaller proportion of the content on a forecasting page. As this page grows I could imagine them becoming separate pages again too. --Jayzzee (talk) 15:58, 3 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Sounds reasonable; copy that. No23139116 (talk) 20:54, 4 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I am curious about how affective forecasting may play out in the lives of college students.

Can students predict their happiness (say in a career) based on their experience in college? How much of that prediction is based on what they are learning in/through classroom learning? How does affective forecasting change for students over their college career? Does future happiness change when a student changes majors (or other potential life altering decisions)?

I cut out the following paragraph.

"A classic example is that of an overweight teenager who is shunned by his peers, and plans on losing his excess weight which is at the root of his social ineptitude. After that, he would have the confidence to be more positively assertive and become more well-liked by his peers and feel more belonged, due to him having planned everything out starting with the root of his problem."

My main reason is that this is not a "classic example" of affective forecasting. Affective forecasting just means judging how you will feel in the future, and isn't about solving problems by planning things out. The example could possibly be rewritten to refer to a teenager who thinks that losing weight will make him happier, and then finds that it either does or does not. However, affective forecasting is mostly concerned with cognitive biases that lead to inaccurate forecasts, and this example does not lend itself to illustrating that point. ("Classic" examples in the field are more along the lines of people predicting how they will feel if their team wins the championship, or their party loses the election.)

Furthermore, the paragraph is confusing and contains grammatical errors.

Mujokan 11:49, 3 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I also cut out the final paragraph: "Affective forecasting is an important concept in psychology, because psychologists try to study what situations in life are important to humans, and how they change their views with time."

It is not up to encyclopedia standard, and just states the obvious.

Mujokan 11:58, 3 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Regarding the effects of the "focusing illusion" or "focalism" in affective forecasting and the subfield decision making: it has been found that the focusing illusion causes an impact bias in predicted satisfaction with public transit, something which subsequently results in biased predicted satisfaction. It has also been found that "defocusing techniques" counteract this adverse effect of the focusing illusion (focalism), something which makes predicted satisfaction with public transit become more accurate and thus may facilitate a travel mode change. The effect is explained to be this: The Focusing illusion or Focalism makes people focus on a narrow range of features, thus disregarding the broader context in which the event takes place. This causes an impact bias. Defocusing techniques, however, introduce other features, thereby making people aware of the fact that the focal event is embedded in a broader context, something that counteracts the focusing illusion and helps people make more accurate predictions about satisfaciton with public transit. (it has been referred to predicted satisfaction with public transit in the subfield of decision making, but the information on public transit and focusing illusion / defocusing techniques are new, very recent results) Reference: Pedersen, Tore (2011). Affective Forecasting in Travel Mode Choice. Karlstad University Studies. Karlstad, Sweden. Unfortunately, I'not technically capable of adding add this information to this wiki-article on affective forecasting, but I will attempt to learn how to do it - although if someone wants to add it before I get around to doing it, please feel free :-) Urbanlife61 (talk) 20:24, 10 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]


I cut the paragraph about "Future Anhedonia" and the sentence alluding to it in the Time Discounting section for several reasons. The most important is that recent research has found the results of the experiment that led to the term "future anhedonia" to be due to an artifact of the hypothetical questionnaire research methodology, not an actual differnce in people's estimates of their happiness in receiving rewards (McFall, & Abraham, 2016). Other researchers conducted a non-hypothetical, real-world version of the task and there was no effect (Ahearn et al., 2015). Additionally, the paragraph was poorly written and several ofthe statements and examples were not consistent with the Kassam et al. (2008) study that was the sole support for the paragraph. It's best when an encyclopedia entry replies on multiple sources of evidence vs. one study.

Here are specific problems with the cut text: "It is expected that affective reactions to an event will be less intense in the future than in the present.[34]" - based on Kassam et al. (2008) study, so the findings are not clear. Also, the sentence is ambiguous. It's uncleaar whether it refers to a belief that people have that their affective reactions to an event in the future would be less intense, or whether it refers to a finding that people's affective experiences actually differ based on the timing of the expected event. These are different; furthermore, the Kassam study did not measure people's awareness of differences in their affect between present and future events.

"Future anhedonia is an affective forecasting error which occurs when a person believes that they will experience less intense affects of an event that will occur in the future, than if the same event occurred in the present,[34] meaning that if a bad thing happens right now it would be considered much worse than if it happens next year." Again, based on one study that is being contested. More importantly, the example is not appropriate. The Kasam study only measured positive events, mainly receiving $20, which in of itself is not a strong positive event for most people. Negative events can have different temporal profiles than positive events, see research on negativity biases.

"Forecasts of the duration of feelings often capture the tendency for emotions to fade over time, but underestimate the speed in which this happens.[5]" This is irrelevant to the rest of the paragrpah.

"For example, in a study participants were asked to predict their happiness after receiving $20. They rated how happy they would feel if they were to receive $20 tomorrow or if they were to receive it in a year. They found that participants predicted that they would be happier receiving $20 sooner, compared to receiving it in the future.[34] Applied to affective forecasting, this helps explain why people underestimate the intensity of future events.[34] They consider how they are feeling now much more than how they would feel in the future." This is the description of the Kassam method. Later research shows that people's ratings of how happy they are include their subjective valuation of instant gratification; in other words, they do not only answer the question based on how happy the $20 makes them, but how happy they are to have to wait to get it. No one wants to wait. It's simply delayed gratification. When people were asked to explain their differences in their affective valuations of present and future $20 rewards, they indicated they wanted the money now. No one indicated that they would like the money more now than how much they would like it later (MCFall & Abraham, 2016). This shows that using hypothetical surveys to study decision making can faciliate experimenter bias - a survey can be designed for a purpose and easily interpreted consistently with that aim, because the measure does not necessarily tease apart people's true motives.

Finally, the whole paragrpah has some writing/grammar/style problems. Mcfa0750 (talk) 02:44, 16 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Page additions

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I am currently working with a group of fellow psychology students to enrich the content of the affective forecasting Wiki. We are considering three specific additions to the page content:

1) The region-beta paradox is only briefly mentioned in the immune neglect section. The page currently states that this process "complicates forecasting, leading to errors". It does not, however, discuss how this complication affects ecologically valid behaviors. Our group is interested in filling this gap using recent experimental work from Cameron and Payne (2011). These authors found evidence that the region-beta paradox helps to explain the collapse of compassion phenomenon, where individuals’ compassion decreases as the number of people in need of help increases. In study 2 participants read about either 1 or a group of 8 children from Darfur, and were told that they would be asked to make a donation later in the experiment. Using a dynamic measure of affect, the researchers assessed whether collapse of compassion results from proactive emotional regulation driven by accurate affective forecasts, or reactive regulation in response to currently experienced negative emotions. The results suggest that only skilled emotion regulators experience collapse of compassion, and that they do so by proactively regulating their emotions prior to the onset of any initial negative affect. In order to further establish the causal role of proactive emotional regulation in the collapse of compassion phenomenon, study 3 participants read the same materials and were encouraged to either down-regulate or experience their emotions. Participants instructed to down-regulate their emotions reported feeling less upset for 8 children than for 1, presumably because of the increased emotional burden and regulatory effort required for the former (an example of the region-beta paradox).

2) The wikipedia page is missing information about personality neglect. Personality neglect is a theory that individuals overlook their personalities when making decisions about the future. We think this should be apart of the page as it is a characteristic of affective forecasting. In a study done by Quoidbach & Dunn (2010), they used students feelings about future exam score predictions as a way to measure the effect. They had students rate their dispositional happiness before they received their exam grades. They also rated how they would feel two weeks after receiving their exam grades. They found that individuals failed to to relate their personal dispositional happiness to their future emotional state. This was not enough information to provide enough proof of personality neglect so they performed a second study. Study 2 had participants rate their own happiness and neuroticism. This time, they used participants future feeling predictions about a US presidential election between Obama and McCain. They found that neuroticism was correlated with impact bias, the overestimation in feelings of how long and intense those feelings were. Individuals who had higher rated neurotic traits, showed a stronger tendency to overestimate happiness linked with a positive event.


3) The positive vs. negative affect section is extremely brief and generalized, and our group feels it is important to elaborate on the differences between positive and negative affects, and the variables that play a role in the differences. The section currently just states that “accuracy in affective forecasting is greater for positive than negative affect.” This broad and vague claim as it is now is not entirely correct, as displayed by the findings of Finkenauer, Gallucci, van Dijk, & Pollman (2007). The researchers studied the diaries of students who were soon to take their driver’s license exam, and made affective forecasts about the outcome of the upcoming exam in their diaries. Finkenauer et al. (2007) discovered that people showed greater forecasting accuracy for positive affect than negative affect when the event/trigger is distant and greater forecasting accuracy for negative affect when the event/trigger is closer in time. This compelling distinction and including the influence of time for accuracy of positive and negative affects is critical in updating this brief section with more extensive and correct information than what is currently present.


Cameron, C., & Payne, B. (2011). Escaping affect: How motivated emotion regulation creates insensitivity to mass suffering. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100, 1-15.

Finkenauer, C., Gallucci, M., van Dijk, W., & Pollmann, M. (2007). Investigating the role of time in affective forecasting: Temporal influences on forecasting accuracy. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 33, 1152-1166.

Quoidbach, J., & Dunn, E. W. (2010). Personality neglect: The unforeseen impact of personal dispositions on emotional life. Psychological Science, 21, 1783-1786.

ThePhilosophyof9 (talk) 03:23, 9 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

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