that predicting specific emotions in response to more complex social events leads to greater inaccuracy. For example, one study found that while many women who imagine encountering gender harassment predict feelings of anger, in reality, a much higher proportion report feelings of fear. Other research suggests that accuracy in affective forecasting is greater for positive affect than negative affect, suggesting an overall tendency to overreact to perceived negative events. Gilbert and Wilson posit that this is a result of our psychological immune system. While affective forecasts take place in the present moment, researchers also investigate its future outcomes. That is, they analyze forecasting as a two-step process, encompassing a current prediction as well as a future event. Breaking down the present and future stages allow researchers to measure accuracy, as well as tease out how errors occur. Gilbert and Wilson, for example, categorize errors based on which component they affect and when they enter the forecasting process. In the present phase of affective forecasting, forecasters bring to mind a mental representation of the future event and predict how they will respond emotionally to it. The future phase includes the initial emotional response to the onset of the event, as well as subsequent emotional outcomes, for example, the fading of the initial feeling. When errors occur throughout the forecasting process, people are vulnerable to biases. These biases disable people from accurately predicting their future emotions. Errors may arise due to extrinsic factors, such as framing effects, or intrinsic ones, such as cognitive biases or expectation effects. Because accuracy is often measured as the discrepancy between a forecaster's present prediction and the eventual outcome, researchers also study how time affects affective forecasting. For example, the tendency for people to represent distant events differently from close events is captured in the construal level theory. The finding that people are generally inaccurate affective forecasters has been most obviously incorporated into conceptualizations of happiness and its successful pursuit, as well as decision making across disciplines. Findings in affective forecasts have stimulated philosophical and ethical debates, for example, on how to define welfare. On an applied level, findings have informed various approaches to healthcare policy, tort law, consumer decision making, and measuring utility (see below sections on economics, law, and health). Newer and conflicting evidence suggests that intensity bias in affective forecasting may not be as strong as previous research indicates. Five studies, including a meta-analysis,