Thoughts of death disrupt foresight: the 'ostrich bias'

Abstract

Humans have a predilection for optimistic personal scenarios when thinking of their future. They tend not to project stressful episodes into the future and are inclined to repress the idea of their vulnerability, to an extent that, when explicitly asked to think about their death, they use various cognitive strategies to deny it. In this study, we investigated the specific coping persons can use when required to construct personal future scenarios after imagining their own death. Our participants were asked to describe in details first the moment of their own’s death and then past and future personal events. We observed a selective reduction in specificity, but not in accessibility, of future simulations, whereas past episodes were normally re-constructed in all the conditions. We named this effect the ‘ostrich bias’. We interpreted it as a protective behaviour against future thoughts that could possibly direct toward an inescapable mental threat.

Cuing both positive and negative episodic foresight reduces delay discounting but does not affect risk-taking

“…This is because imagining an emotional future event can trigger emotions in the here-and-now, "as if" the event were really occurring (Damasio, 2009;Gilbert & Wilson, 2007) -allowing people to anticipate the delayed value of their current patience. Indeed, there are a number of reasons to believe that the relationship between episodic foresight and intertemporal decision-making might ultimately depend on the emotional valence of the thoughts, including the catalogue of differences between the processes and consequences of positively and negatively valenced foresight (see Barsics, Van der Linden, & D'Argembeau, 2015;de Vito, Neroni, Gamboz, Della Sala, & Brandimonte, 2014).…”

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

“…One of the earliest findings on prospection was the identification of a valence effect on the characteristics of future-oriented thoughts. 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).…”

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

“…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).…”