Lessons from the past: Do people learn from experience that emotional reactions are short-lived?

Do people learn from experience that emotional reactions to events are ofte n short-lived? Two studies indicate that it depends on whether the events a re positive or negative. People. who received positive or negative feedback on a test were not as happy or unhappy as they would have predicted. Peopl e in the positive feedback condition did not learn from this experience whe n making predictions about their reactions to future Positive events. Peopl e in the negative feedback condition moderated their predictions about thei r reactions to future negative events, but this may not have been a result of learning. Rather participants denigrated the test as a way of making the mselves feel better and, when predicting future reactions, brought to mind this reconstrual of the test and inferred that doing poorly on it again wou ld not make them very unhappy. Experience with a negative event (but not wi th a positive event) may improve the accuracy of one's affective forecasts, but the extent to which people learn from their affective forecasting erro rs may be limited.