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April 12th: Wrap Up

Construal:
- actors subjective understanding of his/her situation
- impact of an objective stimulus depends on the meaning we attach to it
- naive realism: subjective experience sort of like objective reality
- do not fully appreciate the subjectivity of own construals
- do not allow for others construals when interpreting behaviour
- believes differences in construal are because others are biased (I struggle with ambiguities;
others see world in black and white)
- uninformed and biased
- e.g. They Saw a Game:
- Princeton-Dartmouth football game (rough game)
- had students fill out questionnaire
- results: rated the other schools team as more likely to have instigated rough play
- also believed that the game was rough and dirty
- people see what they want to be - subjects perceptions swayed by construals
- e.g. Hostile Media:
- 13-minutes news clip about Israeli invasion of Lebanon
- 144 people split between pro-Israeli and pro-Arab
- results: each group favoured their own more
- How biased is the other person? - the more someone disagrees with their opinion, the more they saw
them as biased
- e.g. Abortion:
- asked pro-choice and pro-life advocates to specify basis for beliefs and estimated views of the
other side
- result: real differences < assumed differences
- also underestimated ambivalence of other side
- saw own position as more rational and other as more ideological
Construal Activation:
- schemata - chronically activated
- not just discrete representations - connected processes and activation
- construct activation affects construals, which affects social and self perception, influencing judgments
and behaviours
- automaticity: effortless, unintentional, efficient, uncontrollable
- automatic guidance system built in - perception-action links
- can also develop from repeated experiences (e.g. goals, motive, stereotypes)
- automaticity and self-control: automaticity lightens load
- ego depletion: e.g. doing something undesirable/suppressing emotions makes it difficult to persist in
other tasks
Happiness:
- unhappiness = not wanting what we get miswanting
- happiness is a function of what we want and what actually makes us happy
- miswanting: wanting is a prediction of liking, but it can be wrong
- imagining wrong event: cannot predict details of future situations
- using wrong theory: cannot predict preferences in future situations (incorrect theories about self)
- misinterpreting feelings: cannot separate feelings about future from current feelings; affective
contamination

- miswanting over time = durability bias - overestimating emotional reactions to future events,
leading to long term miswanting
- focalism: overemphasizing focal event and underemphasizing everything else
- general happiness = event + everything else
- immune neglect: ignoring our capacity for rationalizations
- AREA:
- Attending to self-relevant unexplained events
- React emotionally
- Explain/reach an understanding
- Adapt (speeds recovery from both positive and negative events)
- affective adaptation: psychological responses weaken after 1+ exposures to stimulus
The How of Happiness:
- gratitude
- thinking about the absence (vs. presence) of negative events
- more satisfied with relationships
- affective forecasting also more positive
- surprise (intensified emotional reactions)
- counterfactual reasoning: downward comparison for negative events

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