Abstract
During intertemporal decisions, the value of future rewards decreases as a function of the delay of its receipt (temporal discounting, TD). Since high discount rates have been associated with a series of problematic behaviours and clinical conditions, current research has focused on possible modulators of TD. Specifically, a reduction of individual discount rates has been shown during episodic future thinking (EFT), wherein time intervals are anchored to personal future events. However, it is not entirely clear whether this effect is mediated by a change in the representation of future events (i.e., from abstract to concrete) or by a positive-emotion modulation. Here, we investigated this issue by manipulating the valence of the EFT (i.e., using negative, neutral and positive episodic tags), and by collecting explicit and implicit measures of behaviour. The results showed a significant reduction of TD in all the three emotional conditions compared to the baseline, with differences among them, thus suggesting the existence of a cumulative effect of the concreteness and affective components of the EFT. The analyses of implicit measures additionally revealed that this effect was mediated by a simultaneous increase/decrease of attraction toward the delayed/immediate alternative. Finally, these effects appeared to be modulated by participants’ baseline discounting preferences. These findings provide important insights on clinical applications in reward-related disorders.
Highlights
The preference for smaller sooner rewards over larger delayed ones, known as temporal discounting, is a commonly observed behaviour during many daily-life situations and the predominant choice pattern of a series of sub-optimal behaviours and clinical conditions [1,2,3,4]
We examined whether the episodic future thinking (EFT)/emotional value manipulation was associated with a shift of the individual discounting preferences, and whether this effect was modulated by the emotional valence of the episodic tag, by running a linear mixed-effect model (LMM) with the condition as fixed effect
The EFT manipulation was effective at reducing the individual discount rate and the modulation was mediated by a cumulative effect of concreteness and emotional valence
Summary
The preference for smaller sooner rewards over larger delayed ones, known as temporal discounting, is a commonly observed behaviour during many daily-life situations and the predominant choice pattern of a series of sub-optimal behaviours and clinical conditions [1,2,3,4]. Prior research has demonstrated that steep delay discounting predicts initiation of smoking in adolescence [1,5,6], and that individual differences in intertemporal. Emotional valence and concreteness effects on temporal discounting funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors to CC, AT, and LC
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