ABSTRACT
H uman beings possess a unique ability to engage in emotional time travel, mentally fast forwarding through time to envision how much they will love their spouse 5 years later or how much they will enjoy a hot fudge sundae next Thursday. Emotional time travel is not without its pitfalls, however, as recent research has documented (e.g., Gilbert & Wilson, 2000). At the most obvious level, people may make inaccurate predictions about how they will feel in a situation because the situation unfolds differently than they expect. For example, if a vacationer imagines a week of swimming and surfing in Australia and arrives to find the beaches swarming with man-eating sharks and deadly jellyfish, her actual emotional experiences during the vacation are likely to diverge sharply from her original expectations. Yet, even if the situation people experience objec-tively matches the situation they imagined, people face a fundamentally different psychological situation when they experience an event than when they imagine it. The failure to recognize this basic point begets a wide variety of affective fore-casting errors. Following a brief review of common forecasting errors, the present chapter addresses six major questions regarding the processes and consequences of emotional time travel.
