Nurturing the Temporally Extended Self: Mental Imagery as an Intervention to Increase Future Self-Continuity and Reduce Academic Procrastination

Abstract

In my thesis research, I examined how mental imagery practice can increase future self-continuity to reduce academic procrastination. A sample of 193 undergraduate students was randomly assigned to a present-focused meditation or to a future-self focused mental imagery condition. I asked participants in both conditions to listen to an audio recording twice per week for four consecutive weeks and to complete a preintervention, half-point, and post-intervention questionnaire. I hypothesized that participants in the mental imagery condition would feel more connected to future self at the end of the semester because of increases in vividness of future self and empathy for future self. I also hypothesized that feeling more connected to future self at the end of the semester would lead participants in the mental imagery condition to report less procrastination. At the four-week mark, results revealed that both future self-continuity and empathic perspective taking were significantly higher for the mental imagery condition than the meditation condition. Furthermore, future self-continuity was predictive of decreases in procrastination. Latent growth model analyses revealed that all variables of interest systematically changed across time. While vividness of future self moderated change in future self-continuity across time, affective empathy for future self mediated the relation between vividness of future self and future self-continuity. Lastly, only empathic perspective taking was a significant moderator of change in procrastination across time. I discuss why participants in the mental imagery and the meditation conditions experienced very similar increases in future self-continuity, vividness, and affective empathy across time, and similar decreases in procrastination. I also explain how results regarding the influence of empathic perspective taking on future iii self-continuity and procrastination are in line with theoretical and empirical evidence from the empathy literature. Finally, I summarize the limitations of the present research design and suggest routes for future research.