Networks of prospective thoughts: The organisational role of emotion and its impact on well-being

Abstract

Recent research has shown that many prospective thoughts are organised in networks of related events, but the relational dimensions that contribute to the formation of such networks are not fully understood. Here, we investigated the organisational role of emotion by using cues of different valence for eliciting event networks. We found that manipulating the emotional valence of cues influenced the characteristics of events within networks, and that members of a network were more similar to each other on affective components than they were to members of other networks. Furthermore, a substantial proportion of events within networks were part of thematic clusters and cluster membership significantly modulated the impact of represented events on current well-being, in part through an intensification of the emotion felt when thinking about these events. These findings demonstrate that emotion contributes to the organisation of future thoughts in networks that can affect people's well-being.

Keywords:

• Future thinking
• Emotion
• Memory network
• Event cluster
• Well-being

Acknowledgement

Julie Demblon and Arnaud D'Argembeau are, respectively, Research Fellow and Research Associate of the Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique-FNRS, Belgium (www.frs-fnrs.be).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ A three-level confirmatory factor analysis (with events as level 1 unit, networks as level 2 unit and participants as level 3 unit) revealed good fit indices for a three-factor model (one factor per need) and for a second-order factor, indicating the possibility to average all three needs (CFI = 0.97, RMSEA = 0.053, SRMR = 0.045). Since we did not have specific hypotheses regarding possible dissociations between the three kinds of need, we thus averaged all questions for subsequent analyses.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the National Center of Competence in Research (NCCR) Affective sciences and financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation [grant number 51NF40-104897].