Principles Into Practice With Kain Ramsay

Human beings possess the unique ability to engage in emotional time travel, mentally fast forwarding through time to envision how they will feel in future situations. Emotional time travel is not without its pitfalls. 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. Yet, even if the situation people experience objectively 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 recognise this can lead onto a wide variety and array of unwise and ill informed decisions. People's predictions about how they will feel in the future shape many of their decisions, though under certain conditions people place surprisingly little weight on their affective forecasts in decision-making. Supporting the validity of decisions that are based on affective forecasts, most studies suggest that fore