The effects of emotional valence and perceived life stress on recalling personal experiences and envisioning future events.

Abstract

Although it is understood that engaging in mental time travel to remember the past and imagine the future relies on similar cognitive processes, there are important differences. Notably, there is evidence that emotional valence differently affects how past and future events are accessed. Here, we explored the differential effect of emotional valence on past and future event generation in the context of personal stress. This is based on findings that an individual's current life stress -a metric of mental health-alters emotional mental time travel. In an online experiment conducted during the novel coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, 421 participants generated specific past and future events to a series of positive and negative cues and then rated the likelihood that the event would occur in the future, the emotion conveyed in the event, and the difficulty of generating the event. Participants also completed a questionnaire estimating current life stress. We found a general bias toward generating specific positive future events that was not present when generating past events. Additionally, we found a small but significant effect of stress levels on ratings of difficulty and likelihood for events generated in response to positive cues. These results provide new insight into how an individual's current stress selectively targets the way positive life events are perceived. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).