Forecasting emotions depends on how you measure accuracy

Washington, Jan 28 (ANI): People are lousy at predicting their emotions, a new study has suggested.

Samuel D. Gosling and Michael Tyler Mathieu from the University of Texas Austin suspected that researchers were missing part of the story by focussing only on "how we mess up and how stupid we are".

So they re-analysed the raw data from 11 studies of "affective forecasting" and arrived at a less damning conclusion.

"We're not as hopeless as an initial reading of the literature might lead you to think," Gosling said.

Gosling said that if looked at in absolute terms, it's true. Take a group of people, ask them to make an emotional prediction, and on average they will get it wrong.

"But there's also a relative way of looking at it," he said.

One thinks they're going to feel really, really awful when they see that red F on the top of the paper, but ended up feeling only awful.

The authors combed through the literature with two criteria in mind: the study had to be "within-subject," meaning the same person did the forecasting and reported the later feeling; and the two reports had to be about the same event.

They ended up analysing the raw data of 11 articles, comprising 16 studies and 1,074 participants.

They found that indexing relative affective forecasting, that is, looking at individuals and their positions in the group, we're better predictors than if you measure only the average absolute accuracy.

Gosling said that one way of thinking about it is not objectively better than the other. But relative accuracy might be useful in real life.

"The story here is not, 'are we bad forecasters or aren't we?' For me, the story is that past literature says we're bad at this. And in truth we are bad at it in some ways, but not in others." The central finding: "It's complicated," he added.

The study has been published in Psychological Science. (ANI)