ABSTRACT
An important component of emotional processing is our beliefs about our emotions in the future. Even though emotions tend to be of short duration and the result of specific situational triggers and coping strategies, people often over-predict the duration and severity of their future emotions. This area of social psychology is known as “affective forecasting” and includes problematic biases that are based on heuristics or rules of thumb. These include emotion heuristics, anchoring, immune neglect, time discounting and other biases that lead us to fail to recognize compensating factors that may mitigate more extreme or durable emotions in the future. In addition, memory of emotions is also determined by cognitive biases, often leading individuals to fail to recall the wide range of past emotional responses.
