How Teens Imagine Tomorrow: Hopelessness and Suicidality Across Latent Classes of Episodic Future Thinking

Episodic future thinking (EFT), the mental projection of oneself forward in time to pre-experience a future event, is an everyday yet consequential cognitive process relevant for hopelessness and suicidal ideation (SI). Despite its multifaceted nature, no study has examined patterns of various EFT characteristics among hopeless and suicidal individuals, particularly youth. This secondary analysis of Cha et al. (2024) adopted for the first time a person-centered approach to identify four latent classes, each, of positive and negative EFT among 151 community-based adolescents based on subjective characteristics of their imagined future events. Positive and negative EFT classes were distinguished by different subjective characteristics. Imagining less vivid positive future events with emotional detachment statistically predicted higher hopelessness at baseline. Imagining negative future events with a perseverative quality (i.e., previously imagined, ambiguous in likelihood) predicted higher SI severity both at baseline and 6 months later. Our findings suggest positive and negative EFT are not mere opposites of each other, and the relationship between EFT and psychological outcomes may depend on the particular features assessed.