Reduced specificity and enhanced subjective experience of future thinking in ageing: the influence of avoidance and emotion-regulation strategies

ABSTRACT

Future thinking in older adults is characterised by a lack of specificity of imagined events and by an equal or even higher subjective experience, compared to younger adults. We considered whether this lack of specificity stemmed partly from the avoidance of a somewhat disturbing future and then examined the extent to which certain types of emotion-regulation strategies, namely positive reappraisal and positive refocusing, contributed to the subjective experience of future thinking. Middle-aged and older adults completed an adapted version of the AMT, in which temporal distance and cue word valence were manipulated, thus resulting in future conditions assumed to represent varying degrees of discomfort. Results indicate that distant future and negative cues restricted both the specificity and the subjective experience of future thinking. In addition, the use of avoidance strategies predicted the nature of future thoughts in the context of a supposed uncomfortable future (i.e., a distant future induced by negative cues), although it followed quite different age-related patterns. Together with the findings that positive reappraisal and positive refocusing (to a lesser extent) contributed to the subjective experience of future thinking, this study indicates that how individuals imagine their personal future also relies on affect- and emotion-regulation strategies.

KEYWORDS:

• Future thinking
• avoidance
• emotion regulation
• middle-aged and older adults

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Anne-Sophie Boulin and Delphine Lambelet for their help with data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 In an exploratory test, we also examined the regressions between the various types of responses within each temporal distance × positive cue word condition (controlling for depressive symptomatology). The results indicate that no avoidance measure predicts the specificity or the number of omission-type responses induced by positive cue words. These results are presented in Table C of the Supplemental Material.

2 Higher depressive symptomatology scores have been shown to be related to lower phenomenological qualities (vividness, auditory or spatial temporal details) accompanying future events, in healthy (Szőllősi, Pajkossy, & Racsmány, 2015) and dysphoric adults (Anderson & Evans, 2015).

3 Exploratory analyses were run on all the CERQ subtests to examine the association between adaptive vs. maladaptive strategies and subjective experience; see Table F in the Supplemental Material.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) – Affective sciences, financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant number 51NF40-104897), and hosted by the University of Geneva.