The Covid-19 pandemic led countries to place restrictions on the general public in order to protect their safety. These restrictions, however, may have negative psychological consequences as people are restricted in their social and leisure activities and facing daily life stressors. Investigating the relationship between how people are remembering pandemic events and thinking about their futures is important in order to begin to examine the psychological consequences – cognitive and emotional – of the Covid-19 pandemic. The present study examined how characteristics of past and future thinking relate to psychological wellbeing during the Covid-19 pandemic. In an online questionnaire study, 904 participants in Germany and the USA recalled and predicted negative and positive events related to the pandemic. Participants completed a series of questionnaires measuring cognitions and psychological symptoms. Participants’ current psychological wellbeing related to how they remembered events and thought of their future. Participants reported a greater sense of reliving for past compared to future events. However, future events were more rehearsed than past events. Additionally, the emotional impact of positive and negative events differed for the past and the future. Participants seem to be strongly future oriented during the Covid-19 pandemic, but have a negative view of future events.

Notice: This is the author's version of a work that was accepted for publication in Personality and Individual Differences. A definitive version was subsequently published in Personality and Individual Differences.

Contrasting views exist as to how involuntary (spontaneous) versus voluntary (intentional) episodic memories are shaped by factors at encoding. However, there is limited systematic experimental research addressing this question. The present study uses measures obtained at encoding to predict frequencies and qualities of voluntary and involuntary memories of emotional scenes. The valence and contents of the scenes affected how frequently the scenes were recalled, similarly for involuntary and voluntary recall. Intensity, negative valence, and the degree to which a scene was perceived to tell a story at encoding were the most consistent predictors of all retrieval qualities, irrespective of retrieval method. Involuntary memories had shorter retrieval times, suggesting less effort. The present findings add to the accumulating evidence that involuntary episodic memories derive from the same episodic memory system as voluntary memories and that the two ways of remembering past events are similarly influenced by emotion at encoding.

During military deployment, soldiers are confronted with both negative and positive events. What is remembered and how it affects an individual is influenced by not only the perceived emotion of the event, but also the emotional state of the individual. Here we examined the most negative and most positive deployment memories from a company of 337 soldiers who were deployed together to Afghanistan. We examined how the level of emotional distress of the soldiers and the valence of the memory were related to the emotional intensity, experience of reliving, rehearsal and coherence of the memories, and how the perceived impact of these memories changed over time. We found that soldiers with higher levels of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms were more affected by both their negative and positive memories, compared with soldiers with lower levels of PTSD symptoms. Emotional intensity of the most negative memory increased over time in the group with highest levels of PTSD symptoms, but dropped in the other groups. The present study adds to the literature on emotion and autobiographical memory and how this relationship interacts with an individual's present level of emotional distress and the passage of time.

The E-prime file for the paradigm employed in the present study and a data file (containing mean scores and no demographic information in order to avoid information that might disclose participants' identity) can be obtained upon request from the corresponding author.