A sizeable amount of research into affective forecasting has shown that we overestimate the affective impact of future events in both duration and intensity. When assessing the emotional aftermath following a “negative” event, such as losing a job, researchers have consistently observed that subjects have an inflated belief about how ruinous this will be to their happiness. The firing will not sting for as long as is predicted, nor will it be as severe.
The bias also works for the reverse. Using the example of winning the lottery, the level of expected happiness exaggerates the acuteness and underestimates just how quickly it will return to baseline.