Schema-driven construction of future autobiographical traumatic events: the future is much more troubling than the past.
Abstract
Research on future episodic thought has produced compelling theories and results in
cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and clinical psychology. In experiments
aimed to integrate these with basic concepts and methods from autobiographical memory
research, 76 undergraduates remembered past and imagined future positive and negative
events that had or would have a major impact on them. Correlations of the online ratings
of visual and auditory imagery, emotion, and other measures demonstrated that individuals
used the same processes to the same extent to remember past and construct future events.
These measures predicted the theoretically important metacognitive judgment of past
reliving and future "preliving" in similar ways. On standardized tests of reactions
to traumatic events, scores for future negative events were much higher than scores
for past negative events. The scores for future negative events were in the range
that would qualify for a diagnosis of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD); the test
was replicated (n = 52) to check for order effects. Consistent with earlier work,
future events had less sensory vividness. Thus, the imagined symptoms of future events
were unlikely to be caused by sensory vividness. In a second experiment, to confirm
this, 63 undergraduates produced numerous added details between 2 constructions of
the same negative future events; deficits in rated vividness were removed with no
increase in the standardized tests of reactions to traumatic events. Neuroticism predicted
individuals' reactions to negative past events but did not predict imagined reactions
to future events. This set of novel methods and findings is interpreted in the contexts
of the literatures of episodic future thought, autobiographical memory, PTSD, and
classic schema theory.
Type
Journal articleSubject
AdolescentCues
Female
Forecasting
Humans
Imagination
Life Change Events
Male
Memory, Episodic
Stress Disorders, Post-Traumatic
Young Adult
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https://hdl.handle.net/10161/9754Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1037/a0032638Publication Info
Rubin, David C (2014). Schema-driven construction of future autobiographical traumatic events: the future
is much more troubling than the past. J Exp Psychol Gen, 143(2). pp. 612-630. 10.1037/a0032638. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/9754.This is constructed from limited available data and may be imprecise. To cite this
article, please review & use the official citation provided by the journal.
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Show full item recordScholars@Duke
David C. Rubin
Juanita M. Kreps Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience
For .pdfs of all publications click here My main research interest has been in long-term
memory, especially for complex (or "real-world") stimuli. This work includes the study
of autobiographical memory and oral traditions, as w

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