Affective Foresight Accepted to International Conference
Seth Harrell and Megan Anderson will share about Affective Foresight with neuroscientists and psychologists to learn about current research and to promote needed research.
We are happy to announce that we have been accepted to share about Affective Foresight later this month at the International Neuropsychological Society’s (INS) Mid-Year Conference in Dublin, Ireland! The theme is Neuropsychology Without Limits: Expanding Horizons
As always, our goal with promoting Affective Foresight is to create a community of interested researchers and foresight practitioners in order to better understand how futures-thinking impacts our emotions and how our emotions impact futures-thinking. We will do this by highlighting popular psychological research that has already contributed to building Affective Foresight and to show how futures-thinking impacts people’s wellbeing, reduces inequality, and promotes more inclusive futures.
Our thesis: No matter how much futurists utilize logic and reason, imagining the future is inherently an emotional endeavor. Instead of removing it from futures-thinking, let’s embrace and lean into it! Utilizing the neuropsychology of emotion can help foresight professionals become more effective with clients.
We face a world of increasing change and short-termism. Maybe the obstacle for good foresight isn’t a lack of good scenarios. Maybe it’s emotional. Specifically, it’s the emotions we never bring into the room when we try to imagine the future or the wrong emotions we bring instead. We hope to build more emotional intelligence into the work of imagining what’s next from the fear and anger that surface when people confront the status quo, to feelings that don’t even have names yet, because they belong to futures we haven’t lived in.
From highlighting psychological concepts like the “affective forecasting gap” (the tendency to imagine the future using our present emotional state as the template, rather than accounting for how much we’ll have changed by the time we get there), to anticipating the nuance of novel emotional experiences people may have in the future (eco-anxiety). Our purpose at the conference is to build:
A new language for talking about the emotional side of the future so that futurists, psychologists, neuroscientists are able to share and build a new understanding of how to leverage emotion for better futures-thinking
Concrete exercises for foresight practitioners to use in strategic foresight, scenario planning, or change leadership
A clearer picture of how unexamined emotion contributes to and derails efforts to drive change
A research-based understanding for bringing more of yourself (not just your strategic thinking, but your emotional and imaginative self) to the future-facing work
We can’t wait to share our experience with you when we return and to welcome researches eager to explore this area. May the luck of the Irish be with us!