How Happy Will You Feel When You Reach Your Goals?

You may not know or care about the answers to these questions. But you may, from time to time, have asked yourself similar ones. How will I feel when...?

• How will you feel when you turn 70?
• How will you feel when you receive the job offer you have been waiting for?
• How will you feel when your parents find out you are in a lot of debt?
• How will you feel when you run into your ex on the street?
• How will you feel when someone posts a negative review about the article you just posted?
• How will you feel when you achieve your New Year's resolutions?

When faced with choosing something that will happen in the future, we project ourselves to that moment and imagine how we would feel. The feeling that prevails influences our choices and actions, from choosing which movie to watch or which restaurant to go to for dinner to which job offer to take and which city to live in.

Our decisions are often based on how happy we will feel with our decisions. Making accurate predictions about the feelings our future choices will generate is critical. Make the wrong guess, and now you are stuck feeling upset and miserable instead of motivated and inspired.

How well can we rely on our predictions about our emotional future?

The process of predicting how we will feel at a future point in time is called affective forecasting. Affective forecasting does not refer to how we feel about something now but how we expect we will feel during that something later. For example, I feel excited about going for a run in the park now (actual feeling). I also predict I will feel great after my run (affective forecasting). When I go for a run in the park later, I feel great (a new feeling consistent with my forecast). In this case, my predictions and actual feelings are consistent.

However, research shows that our ability to predict our future emotions accurately is weak. Affective forecasting involves predictions about four aspects of an emotional experience: valence, specific emotions, intensity, and duration. To test your predictive ability, think of a future situation you expect to be in, and predict each of these aspects:

• The valence. Valence refers to whether the affect we experience is pleasant or unpleasant. It is the broadest way in which we organize and describe our emotions. The term most frequently used to describe valence is positive or negative. Frustration, for example, has negative valence, while pride has positive valence. Other terms used to describe the bidirectional concept of valence include good/bad, pleasure/pain, or approach/avoidance. Valence is easy to assess. You could easily assess whether you feel “good” or “bad” at this very moment and even how good or bad you feel. Valence–the general direction toward which our emotions will lean–is also the aspect of our emotional state for which our predictions are probably more accurate.
• The specific emotion. Valence is the entry point into our emotional state. After we assess how pleasant or unpleasant our emotional state is, we look for terms to describe it more precisely and delineate it more sharply. The bad feeling we feel could include boredom, sadness, frustration, or envy. The specific word gives shape to the general emotional state and reveals a lot more about causes and effects. While valence may be easy to predict, attempting to predict a specific emotion is more challenging. Because each situation we encounter elicits a blend of emotions, it makes it difficult to predict which specific emotion will emerge. Let's assume, for example, that you decline the invitation to your high school reunion because you expect it will make you feel bad. But which specific negative feelings do you expect? Fear? Shame? Resentment? Disappointment? Disgust?
• The intensity. Intensity is a more elusive term that refers to how strong our emotional reactions are. Conventionally, the words we use to describe emotions have intensity embedded within them. For example, we use the term enraged to differentiate angry from very angry. Similarly, we say we are exhilarated to convey how intensely happy we feel. Intensity is another aspect about which our predictions fall short. It is challenging enough to predict which emotion we will experience. Adding an intensity value to the predicted emotion is even more challenging. How much shame will I feel during the high school reunion? The kind that makes me blush and stutter or the kind that becomes a black hole that I want to be swallowed by?

• The duration. Duration refers to how long a feeling will last. Feelings are transitory, ranging from a few seconds to a few weeks. Mood, for example, refers to a set of related feelings with prolonged duration. While our predictions may be more accurate about short-lived events, such as the amount of pleasure eating the chocolate cake brings, accuracy about duration drops drastically when making predictions about choices that have lasting consequences. A new job may bring relief, and moving to a new city may bring excitement, but how long the relief and the excitement will last is difficult to predict and may not warrant action.

While the research shows that affective forecasting is not a skill we have mastered, a question remains whether affective forecasting requires our attention and whether it can be improved. What are your thoughts?