Research on affective forecasting shows that people have a robust tendency to overestimate the intensity of future emotion. We hypothesized that (a) people can accurately predict the intensity of their feelings about events and (b) a procedural artifact contributes to people's tendency to overestimate the intensity of their feelings in general. People may misinterpret the forecasting question as asking how they will feel about a focal event, but they are later asked to report their feelings in general without reference to that event. In the current investigation, participants predicted and reported both their feelings in general and their feelings about an election outcome (Study 1) and an exam grade (Study 3). We also assessed how participants interpreted forecasting questions (Studies 2 and 4) and conducted a meta-analysis of affective forecasting research (Study 5). The results showed that participants accurately predicted the intensity of their feelings about events. They overestimated only when asked to predict how they would feel in general and later report their feelings without reference to the focal event. Most participants, however, misinterpreted requests to predict their feelings in general as asking how they would feel when they were thinking about the focal event. Clarifying the meaning of the forecasting question significantly reduced overestimation. These findings reveal that people have more sophisticated self-knowledge than is commonly portrayed in the affective forecasting literature. Overestimation of future emotion is partly due to a procedure in which people predict one thing but are later asked to report another.

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Emotional memories are vivid and lasting but not necessarily accurate. Under some conditions, emotion even increases people's susceptibility to false memories. This review addresses when and why emotion leaves people vulnerable to misremembering events. Recent research suggests that pregoal emotions-those experienced before goal attainment or failure (e.g., hope, fear)-narrow the scope of people's attention to information that is central to their goals. This narrow focus can impair memory for peripheral details, leaving people vulnerable to misinformation concerning those details. In contrast, postgoal emotions-those experienced after goal attainment or failure (e.g., happiness, sadness)-broaden the scope of attention leaving people more resistant to misinformation. Implications for legal contexts, such as emotion-related errors in eyewitness testimony, are discussed.

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The present study examined the possibility that the language and response format used in self-report questionnaires influences how readily people endorse misconceptions. Four versions of a 40-item misconception test were administered to European (n = 281) and North American (n = 123) psychology and nonpsychology undergraduates. Response format and ambiguity of phrasing were manipulated. Results indicate that misconception endorsement was strongly influenced by both question phrasing and response format, with students showing more agreement and less disagreement when misconceptions were ambiguously phrased or a 7-point rating scale used. These procedure-related effects were observed for European and North American psychology and nonpsychology students alike irrespective of the amount of time they had spent studying the subject. Implications for designing pedagogical procedures to assess student’s disciplinary knowledge and beliefs are discussed.