in recalling painful experiences, people place greater emphasis on the most discomforting moments as well as the end of the event, as opposed to taking into account the overall duration. Retroactive reports often conflict with present-moment reports of events, further pointing to contradictions between the actual emotions experienced during an event and the memory of them. In addition to producing errors in forecasts about the future, this discrepancy has incited economists to redefine different types of utility and happiness (see the section on economics). Another problem that can arise with affective forecasting is that people tend to remember their past predictions inaccurately. Meyvis, Ratner, and Levav predicted that people forget how they predicted an experience would be beforehand, and thought their predictions were the same as their actual emotions. Because of this, people do not realize that they made a mistake in their predictions, and will then continue to inaccurately forecast similar situations in the future. Meyvis et al. ran five studies to test whether or not this is true. They found in all of their studies, when people were asked to recall their previous predictions they instead write how they currently feel about the situation. This shows that they do not remember how they thought they would feel, and makes it impossible for them to learn from this event for future experiences. Misconstruals When predicting future emotional states people must first construct a good representation of the event. If people have a lot of experience with the event then they can easily picture the event. When people do not have much experience with the event they need to create a representation of what the event likely contains. For example, if people were asked how they would feel if they lost one hundred dollars in a bet, gamblers are more likely to easily construct an accurate representation of the event. "Construal level theory" theorizes that distant events are conceptualized more abstractly than immediate ones. Thus, psychologists suggest that a lack of concrete details prompts forecasters to rely on more general or idealized representations of events, which subsequently leads to simplistic and inaccurate predictions. For example, when asked to imagine what a 'good day' would be like for them in the near future, people often describe both positive and negative events. When asked to imagine what a 'good day' would be like for them in a year, however, people resort to