Emotionality of mental imagery and its effect on choice behavior

Imagining our behaviors and thereby anticipating their rewarding or unrewarding emotional consequences may motivate our choice behavior. This has great potential for clinical interventions aiming to motivate the engagement in adaptive behaviors. We investigated the difference in emotionality between mental imagery and verbal thought and its effect on subsequent choice behavior using a within-subject experimental design with pupil dilation as a measure of emotional arousal. Adults from the general population (N = 40) first imagined and constructed sentences concerning icon-word pairs yielding a positive or negative scenario and then chose between two icons from the same valence (positive or negative) but different thought modalities (mental imagery and verbal thought). Pupil dilation and self-reported emotionality were greater in response to mental imagery than verbal thought, irrespective of valence. Imagined compared to verbalized icons were chosen more often than expected by chance in positive comparisons but not less often than expected by chance in negative comparisons. Our findings extend previous work demonstrating the emotion amplifying quality of mental imagery on a subjective, physiological, and behavioral level. They further provide evidence for the potential to motivate choice behavior using mental imagery as an emotional amplifier in clinical interventions.