Do future thoughts reflect personal goals? Current concerns and mental time travel into the past and future

Abstract

Our overriding hypothesis was that future thinking would be linked with goals to a greater extent than memories; conceptualizing goals as current concerns (i.e., uncompleted personal goals). We also hypothesized that current-concern-related events would differ from non-current-concern-related events on a set of phenomenological characteristics. We report novel data from a study examining involuntary and voluntary mental time travel using an adapted laboratory paradigm. Specifically, after autobiographical memories or future thoughts were elicited (between participants) in an involuntary and voluntary retrieval mode (within participants), participants self-generated five current concerns and decided whether each event was relevant or not to their current concerns. Consistent with our hypothesis, compared with memories, a larger percentage of involuntary and voluntary future thoughts reflected current concerns. Furthermore, events related to current concerns differed from non-concern-related events on a range of cognitive, representational, and affective phenomenological measures. These effects were consistent across temporal direction. In general, our results agree with the proposition that involuntary and voluntary future thinking is important for goal-directed cognition and behaviour.

Keywords:

• Goals
• Current concerns
• Episodic future thinking
• Mental time travel
• Involuntary memory

Notes

¹Participants were taken from an original pool of 64 participants (32 for each temporal direction condition). Four participants were excluded from the past condition analyses due to noncompliance with concentration task instructions (n = 1; e.g., confusion over button press to identify targets), an absence of any involuntary memories (n = 1), and self-reported mental illness (n = 2), and five were excluded from the future condition analyses due to noncompliance with concentration task instructions (n = 4) and reporting only involuntary memories or images not concerning the future (n = 1).

²As part of the standardized questionnaire, participants also rated the importance of each on an 11-point scale (0 = not important; 10 = very important).

³Two additional items were included for involuntary representations; participants were asked to describe the event's trigger or cue, if known, and their level of concentration when the representation came to mind.

⁴The Consideration of Future Consequences (CFC) scale was administered to assess whether this general disposition was related to frequency of goal-related future thoughts. Two subscales were used due to recent research showing a two-factor structure (see Joireman, Balliet, Sprott, Spangenberg, & Schultz, 2008). No relationship was evident between the mean CFC scores and proportion of involuntary (r = −.08, p = .69) or voluntary (r = −.05, p = .79) current-concern-related future thoughts. When immediate (involuntary r = .11, p = .57, voluntary r = .16, p = .43) and future (involuntary r = .004, p = .99, voluntary r = .15, p = .45) subscales of the CFC were correlated against proportion of current-concern-related future thoughts, this lack of a correlation remained. It remains an open question whether other individual differences (e.g., self-consciousness) moderate the CFC future-thinking relationship and/or whether the CFC correlates with other aspects of future thought (e.g., objectively coded detail).

⁵These frequencies differed slightly from those of Cole et al. (2014), as two representations were excluded here due to not having current-concerns relatedness data.