Affective Foresight

Affective Foresight begins with the acknowledgement that futures thinking benefits the human emotional state, seeks to understand emotional nuance of the future, and promotes the benefits of foresight as a tool for improved mental health and decision making

“…there’s a huge blind spot in the language of emotion, vast holes in the lexicon that we don’t even know we’re missing. We have…only a rudimentary vocabulary to capture the delectable subtleties of the human experience. Words will never do us justice, but we have to try anyway.”

Try as we might to utilize reason and logic for our arguments, the human race is first and foremost an emotional species. On a base level, I might even say that the most important aspect of foresight is the ability to create emotional connections between people and their possible, probable, preferred, and preventable futures.

Considering that the main objective of foresight is to decrease the element of future surprise by increasing anticipation, the use of foresight mitigates and therefore reduces the anxiety experienced caused by uncertainty. In other words, the use of foresight leads to better impulse control, learning, and decision making.