关键词: 情绪预测偏差, 特质正念, 注意聚焦, 学业情绪, 生态学效度

Abstract:

Human beings have affective forecasting biases. Dispositional mindfulness may weaken the narrow focus of attention by promoting the expansion of the scope of attention and the association of emotional experience, to better simulate future emotions. For adolescents, schoolwork is an important developmental task as well as an arena for their emotion generation. In the present study, we propose the following hypotheses: Middle school students have academic affective forecasting biases (H1); dispositional mindfulness affects the forecasting bias (H2); and dispositional mindfulness reduces affective forecasting biases by weakening attentional focus (H3). To test these hypotheses, three experiments including field and laboratory situational experiments were conducted.
In the first experiment, 267 middle school students completed the Five Factor Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ), and were invited to predict their feelings on achieving or not achieving their goals in the forthcoming midterm exam. After the midterm exam, they were asked to report their actual emotional experience at the moment they were informed of their final scores. In the second experiment, 70 middle school students were divided into two groups—high/low dispositional mindfulness groups—and invited to predict their emotions if they were to succeed or fail in the Word Combination Test (WCT). The test involved randomly giving participants positive or negative feedback. After the test, the participants were asked to report their real emotional experience of the success or failure. In the third experiment, 136 middle school students participated in a field experiment of achievement score feedback. Participants completed the FFMQ and attention focus questionnaires first, and then predicted their emotions regarding the result of the WCT. After completing the WCT, the participants were asked to answer the questionnaire about their emotional experiences.
In sum, the results of the three experiments congruently prove the existence of academic affective forecasting biases in adolescents. In addition, the influence of dispositional mindfulness on affective forecasting biases was as follows: whether it was a positive or negative situation, adolescents with higher dispositional mindfulness had relatively smaller affective forecasting biases, while adolescents with lower dispositional mindfulness had relatively larger forecasting biases, but the tendency of overestimating and underestimating the emotional experience was not significant. To confirm this, we conducted a meta-analysis combining the three experimental data. The results showed that the mean effect size of dispositional mindfulness in positive situations (achievement of test goals, success feedback) was d = 0.56, Z = 4.31, p < 0.001; and the mean effect size of dispositional mindfulness in negative situations (unfulfilled test goal, failure feedback) was d = 0.42, Z = 3.47, p < 0.001. Further, dispositional mindfulness reduces the cross-context robustness of academic affective forecasting biases. In addition, in the third experiment, we found that attentional focus played a mediating role in the effect of dispositional mindfulness on affective forecasting biases.
This study has two theoretical implications. First, it confirms the existence of affective forecasting biases in middle school students regarding their academics. Second, it reveals the effect of dispositional mindfulness on reducing biases of affective forecasting and its possible mechanism, which could be the amplification-bonding mechanism of mindfulness. In terms of practical implications, the real examination and simulated achievement feedback situations presented in this study are a reflection of real school educational activities and, therefore, have stronger ecological validity.

Key words: affective forecasting biases, dispositional mindfulness, attentional focus, academic emotion, ecological validity