The reality of the past versus the ideality of the future: emotional valence and functional differences between past and future mental time travel

Abstract

Mental time travel (MTT) is the ability to mentally project oneself backwards or forwards in time in order to remember an event from one's personal past or imagine a possible event in one's personal future. Past and future MTT share many similarities and there is evidence to suggest that the two temporal directions rely on a shared neural network and similar cognitive structures. At the same time, one major difference between past and future MTT is that future as compared to past events generally are more emotionally positive and idyllic, suggesting that the two types of event representations may also serve different functions for emotion, self and behavioral regulation. Here, we asked 158 participants to remember one positive and one negative event from their personal past as well as to imagine one positive and one negative event from their potential personal future and to rate the events on phenomenological characteristics. We replicated previous work regarding similarities between past and future MTT. We also found that positive events were more phenomenologically vivid than negative events. However across most variables, we consistently found an increased effect of emotional valence for future as compared to past MTT, showing that the differences between positive and negative events were larger for future as compared to past events. Our findings support the idea that future MTT is biased by uncorrected positive illusions, whereas past MTT is constrained by the reality of things that have actually happened.2 NOTICE: this is the author's version of a work that was accepted for publication in Memory and Cognition. The final publication is available at http://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13421-012- Mental time travel (MTT) is the ability to mentally project oneself backwards or forwards in time in order to remember an event from one's personal past or imagine an event from one's potential personal future (e.g., Tulving, 2002). In the literature, future MTT is often referred to as episodic future thinking (e.g., Atance & O'Neill, 2001;Szpunar, 2010) or constructive simulation (e.g., Taylor & Schneider, 1989), whereas past MTT variably is referred to as episodic or autobiographical memory (e.g., Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000;Rubin, 2006;Tulving, 1983). As is the case for memories, episodic future thinking can involve both emotionally positive and negative experiences (e.g., imagining one's wedding versus imagining the death of a loved one) as well as mundane or important experiences (e.g., imagining tomorrow's grocery shopping versus imagining having your first child). Furthermore, both types of events can be near or far in temporal distance. Both processes involve emotional, sensory and spatial (p)reliving as well as the experience of the self being present in the mental projection (e.g., Berntsen & Bohn, 2010;D'Argembeau & Van der Linden, 2004).Research on past and future MTT has demonstrated striking similarities between remembering past events and imagining future events in a broad range of rese...

Distinct and common cerebral activation changes during mental time travel in relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis patients

“…This tendency to provide a greater number of emotionally positive personal events was particularly important for future events. These results are in agreement with the robust positivity bias and the 'rosy future effect' described in the literature dealing with AM and EFT Rasmussen and Bernsten 2013;Walker et al 2003). Equivalent performance were obtained for the post-scan questionnaire variables between the two groups (with the exception of the amount of details, showing a lower score for MS patients).…”

The role of personal goals in autonoetic experience when imagining future events

“…2 D'Argembeau and Van der Linden (2004) manipulated the emotional valence and temporal distance of imagined events. It was found that participants reported greater autonoetic feelings and more vivid mental representations when imagining positive rather than negative, and temporally close rather than distant, future events (see also Berntsen & Bohn, 2010;Rasmussen & Berntsen, 2013). Szpunar and McDermott (2008) investigated the influence of the familiarity of contextual settings in which imagined future events take place.…”

Frequency, characteristics, and perceived functions of emotional future thinking in daily life

“…et al, 2011), and it has been found that thoughts involving positive events have more social and self-regulating functions than thoughts involving negative events (Rasmussen & Berntsen, 2013). Drawing on the distinction between anticipatory and anticipated emotions as defined above, our aim here was to investigate whether valence effects in the perceived functions of prospections are similar for these two kinds of emotions.…”

“…Compared with representations of negative future events, positive future events are more frequent and imagined faster (MacLeod & Byrne, 1996;Newby-Clark & Ross, 2003), are associated with more sensorial details, clearer representations of contextual information, greater feelings of pre-experiencing, and include more social contents (D'Argembeau & Van der Linden, 2004;de Vito, Neroni, Gamboz, Della Sala, & Brandimonte, 2014;Painter & Kring, in press;Rasmussen & Berntsen, 2013).…”