Effects of past and future autobiographical thinking on the working self-concept

ABSTRACT

While the role of autobiographical memory in self-representation is well established, the identity function of future thinking has received much less attention. Yet, most people commonly imagine future events that convey meaningful information about the person they wish or expect to become. In three experiments, we assessed the extent to which thinking about such self-defining future events influences the current content of self-representation (i.e., the working self-concept). Participants were asked to think about either a past or future self-defining event, or a control topic, before describing aspects of their identity in the form of “I am” statements (Experiments 1 and 3) or completing scales assessing self-related dimensions (Experiments 2 and 3). We found that thinking about a future self-defining event led participants to conceptualise themselves more in terms of their psychological traits, as did thinking about a past self-defining event. Furthermore, thinking about a future self-defining event increased the sense of present-future self-continuity, whereas thinking about a past self-defining event increased the sense of past-present self-continuity. These results suggest that self-representations are fuelled not only by autobiographical memories, but also by projections into the future.

KEYWORDS:

• Autobiographical memory
• future thinking
• self
• identity

Open Scholarship

Acknowledgements

A.D. is a Research Director of the Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique – FNRS, Belgium. We thank Stanley Bennett for his help in data collection in Experiment 3.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Arnaud D’Argembeau: Conceptualization, Methodology, Data curation, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Visualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. Claudia Garcia Jimenez: Methodology, Data curation, Writing – review & editing.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in OSF at https://osf.io/pye9a/.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 What remains unclear from our data is the extent to which the thematic content of activated self-aspects reflects the content of previously recalled or imagined self-defining events, an issue discussed by Charlesworth et al. (2016). Examining the content overlap between self-defining events and subsequently activated self-concepts would be an interesting avenue for future research.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Liège (Fonds spéciaux – crédits sectoriels 9893).