Concreteness and emotional valence of episodic future thinking (EFT) independently affect the dynamics of intertemporal decisions.

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

SUBMITTER: Calluso C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6538244 | biostudies-literature | 2019

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature