When and Why People Misestimate Future Feelings: Identifying Strengths and Weaknesses in Affective Forecasting

@article{Lench2019WhenAW,
  title={When and Why People Misestimate Future Feelings: Identifying Strengths and Weaknesses in Affective Forecasting},
  author={Heather C. Lench and Linda J. Levine and Kenneth A. Perez and Zari Koelbel Carpenter and Steven J Carlson and Shane W. Bench and Yidou Wan},
  journal={Journal of Personality and Social Psychology},
  year={2019},
  volume={116},
  pages={724–742}
}
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… 
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