Individual differences in the phenomenology of mental time travel: The effect of vivid visual imagery and emotion regulation strategies [An article from: Consciousness and Cognition]

This digital document is a journal article from Consciousness and Cognition, published by Elsevier in 2006. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
It has been claimed that the ability to remember the past and the ability to project oneself into the future are intimately related. We sought support for this proposition by examining whether individual differences in dimensions that have been shown to affect memory for past events similarly influence the experience of projecting oneself into the future. We found that individuals with a higher capacity for visual imagery experienced more visual and other sensory details both when remembering past events and when imagining future events. In addition, individuals who habitually use suppression to regulate their emotions experienced fewer sensory, contextual, and emotional details when representing both past and future events, while the use of reappraisal had no effect on either kind of events. These findings are consistent with the view that mental time travel into the past and into the future relies on similar mechanisms.