Predicting Emotions

http://www.apa.org/journals/psp.html

"Our emotions seem attached to elastic bands that pull us back from highs or lows," I reflect in the "Emotions" chapter. Thanks to the "adaptation level" phenomenon, "if our income, grade-point average, or social prestige increases, we feel an initial surge of pleasure. We then adapt to this new level of achievement, come to see it as normal, and require something even better to give us another surge of happiness." New evidence demonstrates the power of this principle.

Consider: How enduringly happy would you be if you became instantly rich? How enduringly sad would your professor be if she was denied tenure? In six studies in a Journal of Personality and Social Psychology article, Daniel Gilbert of Harvard University and his co-authors show that we typically overestimate the durability of our emotional response to bad and good events. Their work provides further testimony to the limits of human intuition.

Consider this: Students involved in romantic relationships expect that a break-up would leave them quite unhappy two months later. But students who underwent break-ups some time ago are simply not that unhappy. Likewise, faculty members coming up for tenure predict that, several years later, they will be much less happy if denied tenure than if their request for tenure is granted. But other faculty members who underwent the tenure process several years previous are actually similarly happy--whether or not tenure was granted or denied.

Gilbert and his colleagues attribute this "durability bias" to people's neglect of their "psychological immune system," which consists of mechanisms that ameliorate negative emotions. These studies provide further evidence of what I describe (in the discussion of happiness in this chapter) as our remarkable capacity to adapt to changing circumstances.

"Satisfaction and dissatisfaction, success and failure all are relative to our recent experience."

It's reassuring, yes? The things that we dread--for me (as a hard-of-hearing person) going deaf--might not be as emotionally devastating as we expect.