where the root cause of their happiness lies. Impact bias is a broad term and covers a multitude of more specific errors. Proposed causes of impact bias include mechanisms like immune neglect, focalism, and misconstruals. The pervasiveness of impact bias in affective forecasts is of particular concern to healthcare specialists, in that it affects both patients' expectations of future medical events as well as patient-provider relationships. (See health.) Expectation effects Previously formed expectations can alter emotional responses to the event itself, motivating forecasters to confirm or debunk their initial forecasts. In this way, the self-fulfilling prophecy can lead to the perception that forecasters have made accurate predictions. Inaccurate forecasts can also become amplified by expectation effects. For example, a forecaster who expects a movie to be enjoyable will, upon finding it dull, like it significantly less than a forecaster who had no expectations. Sense-making processes Major life events can have a huge impact on people's emotions for a very long time but the intensity of that emotion tends to decrease with time, a phenomenon known as emotional evanescence. When making forecasts, forecasters often overlook this phenomenon. Psychologists have suggested that emotion does not decay over time predictably like radioactive isotopes but that the mediating factors are more complex. People have psychological processes that help dampen emotions. Psychologists have proposed that surprising, unexpected, or unlikely events cause more intense emotional reactions. Research suggests that people are unhappy with randomness and chaos and that they automatically think of ways to make sense of an event when it is surprising or unexpected. This sense-making helps individuals recover from negative events more quickly than they would have expected. This is related to immune neglect in that when these unwanted acts of randomness occur people become upset and try to find meaning or ways to cope with the event. The way that people try to make sense of the situation can be considered a coping strategy made by the body. This idea differs from immune neglect due to the fact that this is more of a momentary idea. Immune neglect tries to cope with the event before it even happens. One study documents how sense-making processes decrease emotional reactions. The study found that a small gift produced greater emotional reactions when it was not accompanied by a reason than when it was, arguably because the reason facilitated the sense-making process, dulling the emotional impact of