Involuntary and voluntary mental time travel in high and low worriers

Abstract

Worry as a trait is an individual's general tendency to become worried, which in severe cases is associated with the diagnosis Generalised Anxiety Disorder. Mental time travel (MTT) is the ability to mentally project oneself into one's personal past or future, in terms of memories of personal past events or projections of possible events in the personal future. MTT can be voluntarily initiated or occur involuntarily. The current exploratory study investigated involuntary and voluntary MTT in the context of trait worry, thereby bringing together research on worry and MTT. High (N=20) and low (N=16) worriers recorded involuntary and voluntary autobiographical memories and future projections using a structured diary method. We predicted that MTT in high worriers would show signs of cognitive avoidance, such as reduced emotional intensity, more observer perspective, less visual imagery, or coming up with overgeneral or less self-relevant events. We found only partial support for our hypotheses in that high worriers rated personal memories and future projections lower on measures of self-relevance than did low worriers.

Keywords:

• Autobiographical memory
• Involuntary memories
• Mental time travel
• Cognitive avoidance
• Worry

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the Danish Research Council for the Humanities as well as the Danish National Research Foundation for funding.

Notes

¹The sample (N = 228) here consists of those who wrote their contact information for participation in future studies. A score of ≥ 60 on the PSWQ corresponded to 18.9% of the sample, whereas a score of ≤ 36 corresponded to 21.5% of the sample.

²In one instance the seven high worriers (M = 3.57; SD = .65) measured higher on involuntary autobiographical memories on the measure in words compared to the other high worriers (M = 2.43; SD = 1.27), t(18) = 2.20, p < .05.

³We use summed scores for simplicity's sake; the correlations between the means of both intensity and valence with the means of the three questions, life story, importance, and identity, are in a similar range.