Rubin David C
Department of Psychology and Neuroscience.
J Exp Psychol Gen. 2014 Apr;143(2):612-30. doi: 10.1037/a0032638. Epub 2013 Apr 22.
Research on future episodic thought has produced compelling theories and results in cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and clinical psychology. In experiments aimed to integrate these with basic concepts and methods from autobiographical memory research, 76 undergraduates remembered past and imagined future positive and negative events that had or would have a major impact on them. Correlations of the online ratings of visual and auditory imagery, emotion, and other measures demonstrated that individuals used the same processes to the same extent to remember past and construct future events. These measures predicted the theoretically important metacognitive judgment of past reliving and future "preliving" in similar ways. On standardized tests of reactions to traumatic events, scores for future negative events were much higher than scores for past negative events. The scores for future negative events were in the range that would qualify for a diagnosis of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD); the test was replicated (n = 52) to check for order effects. Consistent with earlier work, future events had less sensory vividness. Thus, the imagined symptoms of future events were unlikely to be caused by sensory vividness. In a second experiment, to confirm this, 63 undergraduates produced numerous added details between 2 constructions of the same negative future events; deficits in rated vividness were removed with no increase in the standardized tests of reactions to traumatic events. Neuroticism predicted individuals' reactions to negative past events but did not predict imagined reactions to future events. This set of novel methods and findings is interpreted in the contexts of the literatures of episodic future thought, autobiographical memory, PTSD, and classic schema theory.
对未来情景性思维的研究在认知心理学、认知神经科学和临床心理学领域产生了引人注目的理论和成果。在旨在将这些与自传体记忆研究的基本概念和方法相结合的实验中，76名本科生回忆了过去以及想象了未来对他们有或将会产生重大影响的积极和消极事件。视觉和听觉意象、情感及其他测量指标的在线评分之间的相关性表明，个体在回忆过去和构建未来事件时使用相同的过程，且程度相同。这些测量指标以相似的方式预测了关于过去重现和未来“预重现”的理论上重要的元认知判断。在创伤性事件反应的标准化测试中，未来消极事件的得分远高于过去消极事件的得分。未来消极事件的得分处于符合创伤后应激障碍（PTSD）诊断的范围内；该测试进行了重复（n = 52）以检查顺序效应。与早期研究一致，未来事件的感官生动性较低。因此，未来事件想象出的症状不太可能是由感官生动性引起的。在第二个实验中，为了证实这一点，63名本科生在对相同消极未来事件的两次构建之间添加了许多细节；在创伤性事件反应的标准化测试中，评分生动性的缺陷被消除，且得分没有增加。神经质人格特质预测了个体对过去消极事件的反应，但没有预测对未来事件的想象反应。这一系列新颖的方法和发现是在情景性未来思维、自传体记忆、创伤后应激障碍和经典图式理论的文献背景下进行解释的。
