Jeffrey D. Green received his B.A. from Dartmouth College and his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He joined the psychology department at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia in 2005. Green studies (a) the interplay of affect and the self, such as the influence of affective states on self-views (e.g., using negative affective states such as anger for self-enhancement) and the role of self-focused attention on moral emotions such as gratitude; (b) the processes by which individuals process and remember threatening self-relevant information (the mnemic neglect model); and (c) close relationships, particularly forgiveness (e.g., the “third-party forgiveness effect”) and attachment (e.g., attachment and animal companions, attachment and exploration in adults). Green’s work has been published in journals including the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Self and Identity, and the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

With the Defining Wisdom grant, Green’s research will extend to the realm of wisdom. Green and his colleagues (Jody Davis, Eli Finkel, and Glenn Lucke) propose that wisdom involves an understanding of the moral consequences of our decisions, and applying that knowledge to those decisions. Recent work on affective forecasting suggests that individuals are poor emotional time travelers: they tend to overestimate the intensity and duration of their happiness after positive experiences and of their sadness after negative experiences. Almost all affective forecasting research has focused on events that simply happen to people. Green and colleagues will extend affective forecasting research into the realm of moral behavior. The proposed research includes a series of experimental laboratory studies and a six-month longitudinal study of couples designed to investigate the following issues. Do affective forecasting errors occur for moral decisions? The authors will examine differences between predicted and actual emotional consequences of benevolent behavior (e.g., forgiving a dating partner) versus hurtful behavior (e.g., retaliating against a dating partner). The authors also will examine differences between individuals’ predictions about the emotional experiences of others and others’ actual emotional experiences as a consequence of individuals’ benevolent or hurtful behavior (interpersonal affective forecasting). In addition, researchers will attempt to address the question “Who is wise?” by identifying via a series of personality measures who the wisest (i.e., most accurate affective forecasters) individuals are.