Everything is going to be okay: emotion regulation and immune neglect in affective forecasting

Abstract

People make errors when forecasting future negative affect possibly due to immune neglect, the failure to account for the activity of the psychological immune system that regulates negative affect. This study examined the effect of emotion regulation (ER) on affective forecasting (AF) errors due to immune neglect during an everyday, navigation task. Participants (N = 173) were randomly assigned to use ER strategies that typically vary in their effectiveness (cognitive reappraisal, suppression, or no strategy) prior to forecasting. We reasoned that if we found smaller AF errors for participants who were assigned to use ER strategies versus those who were not, this would indicate that the underlying mechanism of forecasting errors was immune neglect in a control condition. Presumably, participants in the reappraisal and suppression conditions would not ignore their psychological immune systems and, thus, make smaller forecasting errors than those in the control condition. Contrary to the hypothesis, participants showed similar levels of AF errors across all three ER conditions. Overall, this study suggests that ER does not always contribute to AF errors via immune neglect in everyday situations.

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