Involuntary (spontaneous) mental time travel into the past and future

Regret as autobiographical memory

“…This clustering of specific events in the near future is precisely what construal theory predicts and it is also consistent with the studies reviewed in the chapter introduction comparing past and future thought, which show that specific future events tend to be located in the near future (Berntsen & Jacobsen, 2008;Spreng & Levine, 2008). Although the life script does not locate specific regrets in an particular part of the lifespan, construal predicts that they would concern temporally near events, which in these studies happens to be the bump period, so while the distribution of specific regrets may appear at first glance to be problematic to the script-based hypotheses, it is not at all problematic in temporal construal terms.…”

“…As predicted by the studies of prospective thinking (Berntsen & Jacobsen, 2008;Spreng & Levine, 2008) and temporal construal (Liberman & Trope, 1998;Liberman, Sagristano & Trope, 2003), almost all of the specific regrets concern events in the near future. General anticipated regrets on the other hand extend further into the future and peak in the fourth decade.…”

Prevalence and determinants of direct and generative modes of production of episodic future thoughts in the word cueing paradigm

“…While not downplaying the importance of such processes, the present research shows that episodic future thoughts are not necessarily effortfully generated, but instead can come to mind rapidly, with no search effort and information manipulation, in response to a cue (see also Anderson et al, 2012;Berntsen & Jacobsen, 2008;D'Argembeau & Mathy, 2011;Finnbogadottir & Berntsen, 2013, for related observations). Most importantly, however, our data suggest that the direct production of episodic future thoughts mainly occur for events that have already been contemplated on a previous occasion, rather than novel events (i.e., events that have not been previously imagined or experienced).…”

Implausible future events in a confabulating patient with an anterior communicating artery aneurysm

“…That is, although past and future events are generally positive, future events display an additional positive bias (Berntsen & Jacobsen, 2008;Newby-Clark & Ross, 2003). Furthermore, Newby-Clark & Ross (2003) found that individuals take longer to generate negative (versus positive) future happenings, whereas latencies for positive and negative past events were equivalent.…”