Department of Neuroscience, Imaging and Clinical Sciences, Gabriele d'Annunzio University, and Institute for Advanced Biomedical Technologies (ITAB), Chieti Scalo, Italy.
Department of Business and Management, LUISS Guido Carli University, Rome, Italy.
PLoS One. 2019 May 28;14(5):e0217224. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0217224. eCollection 2019.
During intertemporal decisions, the value of future rewards decreases as a function of the delay of its receipt (temporal discounting, TD). Since high discount rates have been associated with a series of problematic behaviours and clinical conditions, current research has focused on possible modulators of TD. Specifically, a reduction of individual discount rates has been shown during episodic future thinking (EFT), wherein time intervals are anchored to personal future events. However, it is not entirely clear whether this effect is mediated by a change in the representation of future events (i.e., from abstract to concrete) or by a positive-emotion modulation. Here, we investigated this issue by manipulating the valence of the EFT (i.e., using negative, neutral and positive episodic tags), and by collecting explicit and implicit measures of behaviour. The results showed a significant reduction of TD in all the three emotional conditions compared to the baseline, with differences among them, thus suggesting the existence of a cumulative effect of the concreteness and affective components of the EFT. The analyses of implicit measures additionally revealed that this effect was mediated by a simultaneous increase/decrease of attraction toward the delayed/immediate alternative. Finally, these effects appeared to be modulated by participants' baseline discounting preferences. These findings provide important insights on clinical applications in reward-related disorders.
在跨期决策中，未来奖励的价值会随着其获得时间的延迟而降低（时间贴现，TD）。由于高贴现率与一系列问题行为和临床状况有关，因此目前的研究集中在 TD 的可能调节因素上。具体来说，在情景性未来思维（EFT）中，个体贴现率会降低，其中时间间隔与个人未来事件相关联。然而，目前尚不清楚这种效应是否是由未来事件的表示方式（即从抽象到具体）变化或积极情绪调节引起的。在这里，我们通过操纵 EFT 的效价（即使用消极、中性和积极的情景标签），并收集行为的显性和隐性测量来研究这个问题。结果表明，与基线相比，所有三种情绪条件下的 TD 都显著降低，且它们之间存在差异，这表明 EFT 的具体性和情感成分的累积效应的存在。隐性测量的分析还表明，这种效应是由对延迟/即时替代物吸引力的同时增加/减少介导的。最后，这些效应似乎受到参与者基线贴现偏好的调节。这些发现为奖励相关障碍的临床应用提供了重要的见解。
