The relationship between emodiversity and affective forecasting

Official URL: https://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b2748999_(Table of contents)

Affective forecasting – the prediction of future emotions – is often inaccurate, and shows individual differences. Since imagining the future depends on present and past experience, we investigated whether individual differences in emotional experience would predict individual differences in affective forecasting (in)accuracy. Specifically, we tested whether affective forecasting was associated with emodiversity, the variety, and evenness of emotional experience. We conducted three studies. In the first one, one hundred and thirty-five students rated their current positive and negative affect on seven consecutive days. On the first day, they also forecast what their affect would be on the seventh day. We estimated their emodiversity from their responses on the first six days; we used their ratings on the seventh day to assess the accuracy of their earlier forecasts. Negative emodiversity was associated with overestimations of future negative affect. In the second study, one hundred thirty-six participants rated how frequently they experienced positive and negative emotions. They received a list of positive and negative events, and forecasted their feelings for each event. We could not observe any significant correlations between emodiversity and affective forecasting biases. The third study was a replication study of the second study, and we did not find any significant association between emodiversity and forecasting variables. These findings suggest that forecasting errors for an ambiguous future are related to current affect, and that it is the variety, not just the extent, of negative affect which predicts such errors. However, emodiversity does not relate to forecasts of general positive and negative feelings caused by specific events.