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Lessons from the Past: Do People Learn from Experience that Emotional Reactions Are Short-Lived?

University of Virginia, tdw{at}virginia.edu

Jay Meyers

University of Virginia

Daniel T. Gilbert

Harvard University

Do people learn from experience that emotional reactions to events are often short-lived? Two studies indicate that it depends on whether the events are positive or negative. People who received positive or negative feedback on a test were not as happy or unhappy as they would have predicted. People in the positive feedback condition did not learn from this experience when making predictions about their reactions to future positive events. People in the negative feedback condition moderated their predictions about their reactions to future negative events, but this may not have been a result of learning. Rather, participants denigrated the test as a way of making themselves feel better and, when predicting future reactions, brought to mind this reconstrual of the test and inferred that doing poorly on it again would not make them very unhappy. Experience with a negative event (but not with a positive event) may improve the accuracy of one’s affective forecasts, but the extent to which people learn from their affective forecasting errors may be limited.

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