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Individual differences in the frequency of voluntary & involuntary episodic memories, future thoughts, and counterfactual thoughts

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Abstract

Voluntary and involuntary mental time travel can take the form of episodic memory, episodic future thinking, and episodic counterfactual thinking. This study uses an individual-differences approach to understand why people engage in these forms of mental time travel. The individual-differences variables include trait-level personality, boredom proneness, depression, anxiety, stress, emotion regulation, mindfulness, mind-wandering, positive and negative affect, rumination, optimism, thinking styles, and time perspective. Across two studies, our results indicate that individual differences underlie these forms of mental time travel. The most unique, episodic counterfactual thinking, was alone positively correlated with negative emotionality and negatively correlated with optimism. We also observe differences as a function of voluntariness and discuss these findings in relation to the cognitively demanding nature of constructing future and counterfactual thoughts. We discuss the importance of distinguishing voluntary from involuntary thinking and assessing episodic counterfactual thinking in relation to episodic memory and episodic future thinking.

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Availability of data and materials

The author has no relevant financial or non-financial interests to disclose. The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available in the OSF repository, https://osf.io/73ce5/.

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    Jared G. Branch

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Branch, J.G. Individual differences in the frequency of voluntary & involuntary episodic memories, future thoughts, and counterfactual thoughts. Psychological Research 87, 2171–2182 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-023-01802-2

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