The Experimental Research On The Impact Of Personality Traits And Emotion On Affective Forecasting Biases

Affective forecasting refers to people’s emotional responses to future events, the initial studies from decision-making domains. Numerous studies have found that people generally able to accurately predict emotional titer and specific emotions of future events, but there are intensity bias and duration bias in affective forecasting, namely affective forecasting biases and influence of deviation. Numerous Studies have shown that affective forecasting biases have the important enlightenment to decision-making, well-being, physical and mental health, consumption and interpersonal relations and so on. Previous studies showed emotional intelligence, big five personality and processing strategies have a significant effect on affective forecasting (Dunn, Brackett, Ashton-James, Schneiderman,&Salovey,2007; Hoerger, Quirk, Lucas,&Carr,2009; Hoerger&Quirk,2010). Trait-congruency hypothesis put forward the personality traits which has important impact on emotional information processing. Therefore, the relationship between personality and affective forecasting biases should be further discussed. According to the mood-congruency effect and the existed research, emotion background, as a motive of the state of an important factor, has an important impact on affective forecasting (Loewenstein,1996). Therefore, this study use the undergraduates as the experimental subjects, explore all kinds of personality subjects’ affective forecasting biases characteristics for positive/negative titer events in the different emotional states, it reveal the relationship of personality traits, emotion and titer type and emotional forecast accuracy.One preparation and two experiments were designed in this research. The preparation uses the Eysenck personality questionnaire screen out the extroversion and introversion subjects and high neurotic and low neurotic subjects. In the first experiment, the subjects of different personality traits were investigated the effect of positive/negative titer events on affective forecasting. The aim of the second experiment is to explore the affective forecasting biases of different personality college students predict emotional state to positive/negative titer events in different emotion. The main conclusions in this study are shown as follows:(1)There existed biases in affective forecasting of future events on undergraduates, which showed overestimate the intensity and duration of future affective reaction.(2) Extraversion is significantly related to the duration bias, the relationship of neuroticism, the intensive bias and the duration bias is significant.(3) High neurotic subjects’ intensive bias of affective forecasting is better than low neurotic and extroversion subjects’ intensive bias of affective forecasting. Extroversion subjects’ duration bias is better than introversion subjects’ duration bias.(4) The affective forecasting biases of negative events are better than the affective forecasting biases of positive events.(5) To a certain extent, emotions affect affective forecasting biases. Under the condition of passive emotion, the duration bias for negative events is better than the duration bias for passive events. Under the condition of negative emotion, the intensive bias for negative events is better than the intensive bias for passive events.