Emotional forecasting

Affective forecasting is the forecasting of one's affect (emotional state) in the future. This kind of prediction is affected by various kinds of cognitive biases, i.e. systematic errors of thought. Daniel Gilbert of the department of social psychology at Harvard University and other researchers in the field, such as Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia and George Loewenstein of Carnegie Mellon University, have studied these cognitive biases and given them names such as "empathy gap" and "impact bias".

Examples of the impact bias include over-estimating emotional reactions to Valentine's Day, football games, elections, movie clips and the reactions of juries to criminal trials.

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