Immune neglect in affective forecasting

Research on emotional prediction, or affective forecasting, shows that people regularly overestimate the emotional intensity of events. Particularly for negative events, people fail to consider how coping resources will ameliorate negative affect, a phenomenon termed immune neglect. In an affective forecasting study of nine football games, participants (n = 180) overestimated emotional reactions to wins and losses, and an experimental manipulation helped reduce bias. Further, those reporting greater use of emotional processing coping strategies recovered more effectively from losses, but failed to foresee this when making predictions, leading to increased bias. This is the first study to document individual differences in immune neglect. Results support the generalizability of biased predictions and contribute to the understanding of affective forecasting and coping.