Emotion differentially modulates phenomenological ratings and narrative descriptions of mental imagery in episodic future thoughts

Humans have a unique ability to project themselves into the future and pre-experience hypothetical events. Many future simulations are emotional, allowing humans to imagine positive or negative experiences they may face. Past research indicates that people simulate emotional events with more phenomenological vividness than neutral events, and positive simulations in particular tend to be rated as having more visual detail/sensory detail than neutral and negative simulations. Yet, studies which find these effects tend to rely solely on phenomenological ratings of vividness and visual detail/sensory detail. In the present study we sought to replicate and extend these findings by investigating whether such effects are present in narratives of episodic future thoughts. We recruited 227 participants from a university participant pool and used a split-half within-subjects design, yielding independent discovery (N₁ = 114, 904 narratives) and replication (N₂ = 113, 854 narratives) samples. We replicated prior work, showing that in both samples positive (versus negative and neutral) future narratives were rated as richer in visual detail and sensory detail, and both positive and negative (versus neutral) narratives were rated as more vivid. Yet, we found, contrary to expectation, that positive and negative future narratives contained diminished perceptual content compared to neutral narratives-an effect observed in both samples. Subsequent analyses revealed that use of space and motion words drove this effect. Our work highlights a complex relationship between emotion and mental simulation and invites further investigation into how our phenomenological representations and narrative descriptions converge, diverge, or interact in future-oriented cognition.