cases accurate affective forecasting can actually promote unwanted outcomes such as the collapse of compassion phenomenon by way of the region-beta paradox. Positive vs negative affect Research suggests that the accuracy of affective forecasting for positive and negative emotions is based on the distance in time of the forecast. Finkenauer, Gallucci, van Dijk, and Pollman discovered that people show greater forecasting accuracy for positive than negative affect when the event or trigger being forecast is more distant in time. Contrarily, people exhibit greater affective forecasting accuracy for negative affect when the event/trigger is closer in time. The accuracy of an affective forecast is also related to how well a person predicts the intensity of his or her emotions. In regard to forecasting both positive and negative emotions, Levine, Kaplan, Lench, and Safer have recently shown that people can in fact predict the intensity of their feelings about events with a high degree of accuracy. This finding is contrary to much of the affective forecasting literature currently published, which the authors suggest is due to a procedural artifact in how these studies were conducted. Another important affective forecasting bias is fading affect bias, in which the emotions associated with unpleasant memories fade more quickly than the emotion associated with positive events. Major sources of error in cognition Focalism Focalism (or the "focusing illusion") occurs when people focus too much on certain details of an event, ignoring other factors. Research suggests that people have a tendency to exaggerate aspects of life when focusing their attention on it. A well-known example originates from a paper by Kahneman and Schkade, who coined the term "focusing illusion" in 1998. They found that although people tended to believe that someone from the Midwest would be more satisfied if they lived in California, results showed equal levels of life satisfaction in residents of both regions. In this case, concentrating on the easily observed difference in weather bore more weight in predicting satisfaction than other factors. There are many other factors that could have contributed to the desire to move to the Midwest, but the focal point for their decisions was weather. Various studies have attempted to "defocus" participants, meaning instead of focusing on that one factor, they tried to make the participants think of other factors or look at the situation through a different lens. There were mixed results dependent upon the methods used. One successful study