Frequency, characteristics and functions of future‐oriented thoughts in daily life

D’Argembeau, Arnaud; Renaud, Olivier; Linden, Martial Van der

doi:10.1002/acp.1647

Cited by 372 publications

(334 citation statements)

References 36 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

272

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Bearing in mind the essential role of AM and EFT in everyday life [16,40,55], the present findings suggest some clinical issues. In the first place, besides our MS patients' occasional complaints, the semi-structured interview showed that they were well (and accurately) aware of their difficulties and able to verbally articulate them to convey a clear message.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Impaired mental simulation of specific past and future personal events in non-depressed multiple sclerosis patients

Ernst

Blanc

Seze

et al. 2014

Journal of the Neurological Sciences

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The aims of the present study were (i) to explore autobiographical memory and episodic future thought in multiple sclerosis (MS), using Levine's Autobiographical Interview; (ii) to investigate the influence of the Interview's high retrieval support condition (the specific probe phase) on MS patients' past and future simulations and (iii) to obtain the patients' estimations of their own difficulties, during the test, and in everyday life. To that end, we examined 39 non-depressed relapsing-remitting MS patients and 34 healthy subjects matched for gender, age and education level. The 73 participants underwent an adapted version of the Autobiographical Interview in two conditions: remembering and imagining personal events. The group of patients also underwent an extended neuropsychological baseline, including particularly, anterograde memory and executive functions. The results showed that the MS patients' scores on the baseline were mildly or not impaired. On the contrary, the Autobiographical Interview measure, i.e., the mean number of internal details, for each of the two phases of the test -free recall and specific probe -was significantly lower in simulated past and future events in comparison with the healthy controls. Within each group, autobiographical memory performance was superior to episodic future thought performance. A strong positive correlation was observed between past and future mental simulation scores in both groups.In conclusion, our results showed, for the first time, the co-occurrence of deficit of remembering the past and imagining the future in MS patients. They also showed more difficulty in imagining future events than remembering past events for both patients and normal controls. MS being a neurological condition very frequent in the young adult population, the clinical considerations of our study might be of interest. Indeed, they give rise to new insights on MS patients' daily life difficulties related to impaired mental simulation of personal events despite general abilities, including anterograde memory, only mildly or not impaired.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Impaired mental simulation of specific past and future personal events in non-depressed multiple sclerosis patients

Ernst

Blanc

Seze

et al. 2014

Journal of the Neurological Sciences

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Like memories for past events, many imagined future events are imbued with emotional value, referring either to positive situations that we would like to achieve or negative situations that we would rather avoid (D'Argembeau, Renaud, & Van der Linden, 2011). However, the extent to which such emotional anticipations are also organized in networks of related events is currently unknown.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Networks of prospective thoughts: The organisational role of emotion and its impact on well-being

Demblon

D’Argembeau

2015

Cognition and Emotion

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Recent research has shown that many prospective thoughts are organized in networks of related events, but the relational dimensions that contribute to the formation of such networks are not fully understood. Here we investigated the organizational role of emotion by using cues of different valence for eliciting event networks. We found that manipulating the emotional valence of cues influenced the characteristics of events within networks, and that members of a network were more similar to each other on affective components than they were to members of other networks. Furthermore, a substantial proportion of events within networks were part of thematic clusters and cluster membership significantly modulated the impact of represented events on current well-being, in part through an intensification of the emotion felt when thinking about these events. These findings demonstrate that emotion contributes to the organization of future thoughts in networks that can affect people's well-being.

show abstract

“…First, people frequently think about their personal future in abstract ways (e.g., by envisioning general goals and events; Anderson & Dewhurst, 2009;D'Argembeau, Renaud, & Van der Linden, 2011) and often access abstract knowledge about their future first when they attempt to imagine specific situations that might possibly happen to them (D'Argembeau & Mathy, 2011). Second, the construction of future event representations relies to a substantial extent on schematic knowledge (Berntsen & Bohn, 2010;Rubin, 2013).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The organization of prospective thinking: Evidence of event clusters in freely generated future thoughts

Demblon

D’Argembeau

2014

Consciousness and Cognition

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Recent research suggests that many imagined future events are not represented in isolation, but instead are embedded in broader event sequences-referred to as event clusters. It remains unclear, however, whether the production of event clusters reflects the underlying organizational structure of prospective thinking or whether it is an artifact of the event-cuing task in which participants are explicitly required to provide chains of associated future events.To address this issue, the present study examined whether the occurrence of event clusters in prospective thought is apparent when people are left to think freely about events that might happen in their personal future. The results showed that the succession of events participants spontaneously produced when envisioning their future frequently included event clusters. This finding provides more compelling evidence that prospective thinking involves higher-order autobiographical knowledge structures that organize imagined events in coherent themes and sequences.

show abstract

Frequency, characteristics and functions of future‐oriented thoughts in daily life

Cited by 372 publications

References 36 publications

Impaired mental simulation of specific past and future personal events in non-depressed multiple sclerosis patients

Impaired mental simulation of specific past and future personal events in non-depressed multiple sclerosis patients

Networks of prospective thoughts: The organisational role of emotion and its impact on well-being

The organization of prospective thinking: Evidence of event clusters in freely generated future thoughts

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About