Do you remember your prom? Do you remember your 16th birthday? Do you remember your first day of school?
People usually have detailed memories of important autobiographical events. These events are usually represented in memory as being tied to a specific context and a specific moment in time. But, this specificity in recall is not necessarily the case for everyone.
Individuals with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) often experience a “blurred” recall of autobiographical events. This means that they tend to recall details of categories of events and/or about extended periods of time rather than memories of events tied to a specific time and situation. This lack of temporal and contextual specificity in the memory representation of events contributes to the symptoms of PTSD, such as the recurrent intrusion of distressing memories of traumatic events into awareness.
Something less widely known is that the lack of specificity in memory recall can also be associated with an increased difficulty in imagining future events. This is significant because the ability to clearly imagine future events is associated with a variety of cognitive benefits.
Because these cognitive benefits could be useful for individuals with PTSD in coping with their symptoms, understanding better how they imagine future events is a key step in the eventual development of clinical approaches to support patients.
This is the topic that “Imagining emotional future events in PTSD: clinical and neurocognitive correlates” focuses on. A recent paper published by Mieke Verfaellie, Virginie Patt, Ginette Lafleche, Renee Hunsberger, and Jennifer J. Vasterling in Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, an official publication of the Psychonomic Society.
Shifting attention from the past to the future
The authors used an adapted autobiographical interview that, instead of being centered on remembering past events, requested participants to imagine future events and describe them with as much detail as possible.
Three groups of participants took part in the study: individuals with PTSD at the moment of the study, individuals with a history of PTSD that did not meet diagnostic criteria at the moment of the study, and a control group of individuals with no lifetime history of PTSD. Individuals in all groups also completed a battery of neurocognitive tests.
The task consisted of imagining a variety of events that could be emotionally positive or negative and that would purportedly happen in the short-term (1 month) or long-term (10 years) future. Participants were requested to provide as many details as possible, such as the perceptual and spatiotemporal characteristics of the event, as well as their thoughts and feelings about it.
These methodological decisions allowed the research team to focus on how participants imagine future emotional events, one of the most common types of spontaneous future thoughts. It also permitted the researchers to analyze whether a diagnosis of PTSD can affect the imagination of future events long-term after symptoms have receded or only while individuals actively experience symptoms. Lastly, it enabled the team to explore the relationships between a variety of cognitive processes and how individuals imagine future events.
Unclear visions of the future
Individuals with current or past PTSD produced narratives with a lower number of “internal details” of about the imagined event. In the context of the study, “internal details” referred to those specifically associated with the main event of the narrative, as compared to peripheral or irrelevant details. This pattern was consistent, regardless of whether the imagined events were emotionally positive or negative.
An effect of the time at which the event was imagined was also found, with imagined events in the short-term future (1 month) having a higher number of internal details than those imagined in the long-term (10 years) future. The figure below illustrates these findings.
The authors evaluated the relationships between the internal details of the imagined events with the results of various cognitive assessments using a multivariate test called Partial Least Squares (PLS) correlation. This test allowed them to evaluate the relationships between the different types of internal details (taken as a group), with the diverse neurocognitive tests (taken as another group) completed by participants.
The analysis revealed that the number of imagined internal details relating to the event, place, and perceptual characteristics had an inverse association with the severity of PTSD symptoms, as measured by the CAPS-5, a standardized clinical interview widely used for diagnostic purposes.
The figure below summarizes these results. Please note that the multivariate approach used by the PLS correlation creates latent variables defined by the combined contributions of the original variables (i.e. loadings). In the figure, the height of the bars represents the magnitude of each variable’s loading on the main latent variable revealed by the analysis. The inverse relation between the variables is revealed by their respecting loadings on the main latent variable having an opposite direction.
In addition, the analysis revealed a positive relation between the number of internal details and the performance in recalling verbal pair associates after a delay, and the extent to which participants value future goals. The authors interpreted these relationships as supporting previous findings revealing the importance of personal goals and memory processes when individuals engage in future thinking, and as promising areas to focus future research.
Imagining future research in the area
In the words of the authors, the main takeaway from this study is that
“individuals with current PSTD, as well as those with past PTSD, have difficulty imagining in detail both future opportunities and future threats. As a result, they are less likely to engage in adaptive behaviours that optimally prepare them for what the future may bring”.
Considering that future thinking – when it has an adequate level of detail – can have positive effects on decision-making and emotional regulation, the authors consider that a better understanding of how individuals with current or past PTSD imagine future events could be eventually leveraged to develop clinical interventions. For example, supporting individuals with PTSD to imagine future events with a greater level of detail could help them attain psychological benefits that contribute to reducing their symptoms.
However, developing these potential interventions will first require achieving a much deeper understanding of the mechanisms that underlie the short and long-term relationships between PTSD, and future thinking.
With so many open questions in this intriguing area, please let me invite you to imagine, in detail, what it could look like in the years to come.
Psychonomic Society’s article featured in this post:
Verfaellie, M., Patt, V., Lafleche, G., Hunsberger, R. & Vasterling, J. J. (2023) Imagining emotional future events in PTSD: clinical and neurocognitive correlates. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience 23, 1428–1444. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-023-01121-4