Depression is associated with difficulties in goal pursuit which could be related to deficits in emotional anticipation regarding goal success. Therefore, the reported study investigated emotional anticipation for personal goals and whether this differs as a function of depressive symptoms. After listing approach and avoidance goals, 263 participants made predictions about these goals (e.g. likelihood of achievement and controllability) and rated the vividness and perspective with which they envisaged goal achievement. They also provided ratings of either anticipated (predicted emotions that would accompany goal success) or anticipatory (in-the-moment emotions when imagining goal success) positive emotions. Higher levels of depressive symptomatology were associated with pessimistic predictions about goal achievement, coupled with reduced vividness and greater adoption of observer perspective when envisaging achievement. Furthermore, those experiencing higher levels of depressive symptoms evidenced biases in both anticipated and anticipatory positive emotions associated with goal success. They believed that goal achievement would bring them lower levels of positive emotion and also reported less in-the-moment happiness, satisfaction, and pleasure when thinking about achieving their goals. Irrespective of depressive symptom level, anticipated emotions were generally stronger than anticipatory emotions. These findings have implications both for research on future-oriented emotions (anticipated and anticipatory) and for the development of therapeutic techniques to aid depression.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been an unprecedented public health emergency with wide-ranging psychological impacts. The resulting uncertainty surrounding employment, finance, and health could impact how individuals think about and pursue their personal goals. Specifically, we anticipated that pandemic-related goals would be perceived as less controllable, presenting a unique opportunity to test effects of controllability on self-regulation. We elicited spontaneous self-regulatory thought (SRT) data for personal goals related and unrelated to COVID-19, predicting that (A) the relative prevalence of different SRT modes (e.g., dwelling, indulging, mental contrasting) would differ between COVID-related and unrelated goals; and (B) the typical motivational benefit of mental contrasting (i.e., considering a desired outcome followed by present obstacles) would be attenuated for COVID-related goals. As anticipated, UK-resident adults (n = 288) judged COVID-related goals such as keeping one's family safe to be less controllable compared to unrelated goals, and tended to engage different SRT modes (e.g., higher incidence of dwelling vs. indulging). Mental contrasting occurred equally for both goal types, but when predicting goal commitment, its typical beneficial effect was absent for COVIDrelated goals. Results are consistent with the proposition that low subjective control influences both the cognitive processing of goals (i.e., promoting dwelling) and subsequent motivational outcomes. This poses a challenge to current theory, calling for greater emphasis on controllability as a contributing factor in self-regulation and goal pursuit. | INTRODUCTIONThe coronavirus (SARS-2-COVID-19) pandemic has been an unprecedented public health emergency in terms of its worldwide reach and impact (World Health Organization, 2021). In the United Kingdom, total cases have exceeded 20 million, with over 170,000 fatalities (see tracker by Dong et al., 2020) and repeated lockdowns enforced to limit transmission of the virus (Barber et al., 2021).

Evidence supports the dissociation of voluntary and spontaneous routes to past and future thinking, collectively referred to as mental time travel (MTT). If the diminished voluntary MTT ability found in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) is attributable to a deficit in constructive/generative processes not necessary for spontaneous MTT, ASD traits (Autism Quotient score) in a general adult sample should not be related to total spontaneous thoughts, probability of past or future thoughts, or probability of spatiotemporally specific thoughts during an undemanding vigilance task. Results supported this hypothesis: AQ was not associated with total spontaneous thoughts and did not significantly predict the other measures. This is the first study to explore spontaneous MTT in relation to ASD traits, further supporting the argument that voluntary MTT may be compromised in ASD due to reliance on constructive/generative processes and reinforcing the notion of dissociable cognitive routes to MTT.