Abstract: Affective adaptation is the psychological processes that cause an affective response to weaken after one or more exposures to a stimulus. In those theories that illustrate the psychology mechanism and procedure of affective adaptation, AREA model is the most influential theory. The AREA model holds that people attend to self-relevant, unexplained events, react emotionally to these events, explain or reach an understanding of the events, and thereby adapt to the events, then attend less and have weaker emotional reactions to them. Lots of empirical studies concerning negative events and positive events supported the AREA model. The development of this field needs to deeply investigate the variables that facilitate or impede affective adaptation, cross-cultural research, the precision of the temporal localization of the adaptation trajectory and happiness interventions.

Key words: subjective well-being, affective adaptation, the AREA model