PSYC 289D Chapter Notes - Chapter 5: Hedonic Treadmill, Prefrontal Cortex, Affective Forecasting
12 Mar 2018
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Document Summary
Two types of positive affect: pre-goal attainment and post-goal attainment. Pre-goal is the pleasurable feeling you get as you make progress toward a goal. Post-goal is what arises once you have achieved something you want, this is a short- lived feeling of release when the left prefrontal cortex reduces its activity after a goal is achieved. Pleasure comes more from making progress toward goals than from achieving them. Affective forecasting: predicting how we"ll feel in the future. Tend to overestimate the intensity and duration of our emotional reactions. Human mind is sensitive to changes in conditions, but not so sensitive to absolute levels. People"s judgements about their present state are based on whether it is better or worse than the state to which they have been accustomed. When combing adaptation principle with discovery that people"s average level of happiness is highly heritable, we come to the possibility that in the long run it doesn"t matter what happens to you.
