Collaborative Research: Understanding and Improving Predictions about Future Feelings

人们试图做出能改善生活、让自己快乐的决定，为了做到这一点，他们依赖于情感预测——预测未来的结果会让他们感觉如何。人们对未来结果的情感影响越大，他们就会投入更多的精力和资源来实现或避免它。因此，可以理解的是，情感预测的不准确性被认为是做出正确决策的主要障碍。几十年的研究表明，人们不善于预测自己的感受，而且通常会高估未来事件对自己情绪的影响。虽然这个简单的想法在直觉上很有吸引力，但最近的研究表明，人们实际上非常擅长预测自己情绪反应的某些特征。这项拟议中的研究将更精确地了解人们在预测未来感受时何时、为何会有偏见，以及偏见是如何影响决策质量的。研究结果将为旨在改善卫生、公共政策、教育和经济等应用领域决策的干预措施提供信息。做出重要决定的人——比如是否接受手术、听取公共卫生警告或追求特定的职业——如果能准确预测他们的决定的结果会让他们感觉如何，他们就会更好地了解情况。因此，改善预测的干预措施对于帮助人们做出影响其生命长度和质量的知情选择至关重要。调查者希瑟·兰奇（德克萨斯农工大学）和琳达·莱文（加州大学欧文分校）的初步发现支持了人们在预测自己情绪反应的频率和持续时间时高估的假设。然而，他们的结果也表明，人们在预测自己反应的强度方面要准确得多，事实上，他们表现出轻微但一致的低估情绪强度的倾向。提出的研究测试了研究人员开发的一个新的理论模型来解释这些结果。在四项研究中，研究人员将首次在实验室和现实环境中明确区分情绪强度、频率和持续时间的预测。通过让研究人员更精确地预测情绪的特征，这些研究将澄清人们何时以及为什么高估、低估和准确地预测他们的情绪反应。拟议的研究还将首次分析人们在预测不同的情绪特征时产生偏见的不同原因，人们在日常生活中做决定时自发考虑的情绪特征，以及预测偏见对决策质量的影响。解决这些问题是至关重要的，不仅是为了从理论上理解人们如何思考他们的未来，也是为了理解如何干预以改善决策。

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. The greater the emotional impact people expect a future outcome to have, the more effort and resources they invest in attaining or avoiding it. Understandably then, inaccuracy in affective forecasting has been identified as a major obstacle to making good decisions. Decades of research suggest that people are poor at predicting how they will feel and commonly overestimate the impact that future events will have on their emotions. Although the simplicity of this idea is intuitively attractive, recent studies have revealed that people are actually very good at forecasting some features of their emotional reaction. The proposed research will provide a more precise understanding of when and why people are biased in their predictions about future feelings and how bias affects the quality of decisions. The results will inform interventions designed to improve decision-making in applied domains including health, public policy, education, and economics. People making important decisions--such as whether to undergo surgery, listen to public health warnings, or pursue a specific career-- will be better informed if they can accurately predict how the outcomes of their decisions will make them feel. Thus, interventions that improve forecasting are critically important for helping people make informed choices with implications for the length and quality of their lives.Preliminary findings from the investigators, Heather Lench (Texas A & M University) and Linda Levine (University of California, Irvine) support the hypothesis that people overestimate in predicting the frequency and duration of their emotional reactions. However, their results also indicated that people were far more accurate at predicting the intensity of their reactions and, indeed, showed a slight but consistent tendency to underestimate emotional intensity. The proposed research tests a new theoretical model developed by the investigators to explain such results. In four studies, the investigators will clearly differentiate forecasts of emotional intensity, frequency, and duration for the first time both in laboratory and real-world settings. By allowing researchers to achieve greater precision about the features of emotion being predicted, these studies will clarify when and why people overestimate, underestimate, and accurately predict their emotional reactions. The proposed studies will also be the first to analyze the differing causes of bias when people predict distinct features of emotion, the features of emotion that people spontaneously consider when making decisions in their daily lives, and the consequences of forecasting biases for decision quality. Addressing these questions is essential, not only for a theoretical understanding of how people think about their futures, but also for understanding how to intervene to improve decisions.