Negative Valence Effect in Affective Forecasting: The Unique Impact of the Valence Among Dispositional and Contextual Factors for Certain Life Events.

Virginie Christophe,Michel Hansenne

doi:10.5964/ejop.1945

Abstract

Decades of research on affective forecasting have shown a persistent intensity bias—a strong tendency by which people overestimate their future hedonic response for positive events and underestimate it for negatives one. While previous research has provided answers on the isolated impact of various individual or contextual factors, this study is original in that it brings them together to determine which ones most influence the inaccuracy of affective forecasting. Participants were asked to predict their emotional satisfaction for a personal life event, the course (positive or negative) and date of which were already known. First, the results support previous research by showing that affective predictions are highly associated with people’s affective experience. Moreover, multiple regression showed that among the individual and contextual factors previously reported to be in relation with affective forecasting inaccuracy, only the valence of the event could explain inaccuracy of forecasting. According to a growing body of literature, these findings point out a tendency to underestimate the intensity of the affect predicted both for negative and positive, with a stronger underestimation for negative events: the negative valence effect.

Highlights

Decades of research on affective forecasting have shown a persistent intensity bias—a strong tendency by which people overestimate their future hedonic response for positive events and underestimate it for negatives one
The results revealed that the valence was the only predictor that exhibited a significant effect on the inaccuracy of affective forecasting (p < .01), meaning that participants differently misestimate their emotional satisfaction according to the positivity or negativity of the event
Following the robustness of the negative effect found in this study and throughout the literature, we suggest that future studies should include the valence as a continuous variable rather than a categorical one. These findings suggest that among the main dispositional and contextual variables previously studied in the literature, the subjective valence of the event is the stronger predictor of inaccuracies in affective forecasting

Summary

Introduction

Decades of research on affective forecasting have shown a persistent intensity bias—a strong tendency by which people overestimate their future hedonic response for positive events and underestimate it for negatives one. While previous research has provided answers on the isolated impact of various individual or contextual factors, this study is original in that it brings them together to determine which ones most influence the inaccuracy of affective forecasting. Multiple regression showed that among the individual and contextual factors previously reported to be in relation with affective forecasting inaccuracy, only the valence of the event could explain inaccuracy of forecasting. According to a growing body of literature, these findings point out a tendency to underestimate the intensity of the affect predicted both for negative and positive, with a stronger underestimation for negative events: the negative valence effec

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion