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The Journal of Positive Psychology
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Back to the future: the effect of daily practice of mental time travel into the
future on happiness and anxiety
Jordi Quoidbach a; Alex M. Wood b; Michel Hansenne a
a Department of Cognitive Sciences, University of Liège, Belgium b School of Psychological Sciences,
University of Manchester, UK
Online Publication Date: 01 September 2009
To cite this Article Quoidbach, Jordi, Wood, Alex M. and Hansenne, Michel(2009)'Back to the future: the effect of daily practice of
mental time travel into the future on happiness and anxiety',The Journal of Positive Psychology,4:5,349 — 355
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The Journal of Positive Psychology
Vol. 4, No. 5, September 2009, 349–355
Back to the future: the effect of daily practice of mental time travel into the future
on happiness and anxiety
Jordi Quoidbach
a
*, Alex M. Wood
b
and Michel Hansenne
a
a
Department of Cognitive Sciences, University of Lie
`ge, Belgium;
b
School of Psychological Sciences,
University of Manchester, UK
(Received 18 March 2008; final version received 27 February 2009)
The ability to project oneself into the future has previously been found to be related to happiness and anxiety.
The purpose of the present study was to investigate the causal effect of deliberate mental time travel (MTT) on
happiness and anxiety. More specifically, we address whether purposely engaging in positive, negative, or neutral
future MTT would lead to different levels of happiness and anxiety. Results show a significant increase of
happiness for subjects in the positive condition after 2 weeks but no changes in the negative or neutral condition.
Additionally, while positive or negative MTT had no effect on anxiety, engaging in neutral MTT seems to
significantly reduce stress over 15 days. These findings suggest that positive future MTT is not just a consequence
of happiness and might be related to well-being in a causal fashion and provide a new approach in happiness
boosting and stress-reducing activities.
Keywords: episodic future thinking; mental time travel; happiness; anxiety
Introduction
Of the many abilities that humans possess, one of the
most amazing is the process by which we envision our
future. This ability to imagine personal future events
has been explored in a great variety of areas of
psychology and, depending on the field, has been
referred to under different names encompassing dif-
ferent aspects of the concept such as mental simulation
(e.g., Pham & Taylor, 1999; Taylor, Pham, Rivkin, &
Armor, 1998), future thinking (e.g., MacLeod & Byrne,
1996; MacLeod & Salaminiou, 2001), anticipation of
future experiences (e.g., MacLeod & Conway, 2005), or
goal striving (e.g., Sheldon & Elliot, 1999). Recently, a
fast-growing number of studies have addressed the
ability to envision the future under the term mental
time travel (MTT; e.g., D’Argembeau & van der
Linden, 2006; Quoidbach, Hansenne, & Mottet, 2008;
Suddendorf & Corballis, 2007; Tulving, 2002). MTT
refers to the faculty that allows humans to mentally
project themselves backward in time to relive, or
forward to pre-live, events (Suddendorf & Corballis,
1997). The ability to relive past events is also known as
episodic memory in the literature and has been
extensively investigated (e.g., Tulving, 2002, 2005),
while the ability to project the self forward in time to
pre-experience an event has been labeled episodic future
thinking (Atance & O’Neill, 2001). Past and future
travels rely on a common set of processes by which
past experiences are used to envision the future
(Atance & O’Neill, 2001; Buckner & Carroll, 2007;
Hassabis, Kumaran, Vann, & Maguire, 2007; Okuda
et al., 2003; Wheeler, Stuss, & Tulving, 1997), and both
importantly involve autonoetic consciousness, i.e., ‘the
kind of consciousness that mediates an individual’s
awareness of his or her existence and identity in
subjective time extending from the personal past
through the present to the personal future’ (Tulving,
1985, p. 1). Future MTT implies, therefore, a conscious
act of pre-experiencing future events involving the self
and located in specific time and space. In this way, it is
distinct from merely knowing that some event is likely
to happen and from the general way that one
apprehends the future (i.e., pessimism/optimism).
MTT into the future is considered as a crucial
ability for human beings (Gilbert, 2006; Gilbert &
Wilson, 2007; Suddendorf & Corballis, 1997, 2007;
Wheeler et al., 1997). Indeed, from an evolutionary
perspective, MTT offers a critical selective advantage
insofar as it enhances individuals’ flexibility in novel
situations and versatility to develop and adopt strate-
gic long-term plans to suit selected goals (Suddendorf
& Corballis, 2007). The ability to imagine personal
future events may also provide a motivational break
that counters a natural tendency to time discounting
and impulsive, opportunistic behavior. This capacity is
advantageous in the long term, especially given that
*Corresponding author. Email: jquoidbach@ulg.ac.be
ISSN 1743–9760 print/ISSN 1743–9779 online
ß2009 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/17439760902992365
http://www.informaworld.com
Downloaded By: [Canadian Research Knowledge Network] At: 17:09 11 August 2009
humans depend on cooperation and coordination
(Boyer, 2008). Finally, most individuals’ decisions are
influenced by their (often biased) anticipated hedonic
reactions to imagined future events (i.e., affective
forecasting; Gilbert, 2006; Gilbert & Wilson, 2007;
Wilson & Gilbert, 2005).
Aside from the evolutionary point of view, MTT
into the future also plays an important role in our well-
being and happiness in daily life. Indeed, 12% of our
daily thoughts are about the future (Klinger & Cox,
1987) and this MTT is often pleasurable, as people
tend to imagine themselves achieving and succeeding
rather than fumbling or failing (see Gilbert, 2006). In
one study relating MTT into the future and positive
outcomes, MacLeod and Conway (2005) found that
positive future thinking correlated with subjective well-
being in the general population. The authors also
found a positive correlation between the amount of
positive projections a person could generate and the
size of his social network. Moreover, there is consid-
erable evidence that generating mental images of future
success and of the process to get there can sometimes
increase achievement motivation, effort, and perfor-
mance (Greitemeyer & Wu
¨rz, 2006; Pham & Taylor,
1999; Taylor et al., 1998; Ten Eyck, Labansat, Lord, &
Dansereau, 2006). A positive image of themselves in
the future can motivate action by helping people to
articulate their goals clearly and develop behaviors
that will allow them to fulfill these goals (Pham &
Taylor, 1999; Vasquez & Buehler, 2007). Concurrently,
writing about life goals was found to be associated
with a significant increase in subjective well-being
(King, 2001).
Conversely, there is also evidence from the other
end of the emotional spectrum that people with very
low levels of happiness have altered future-directed
thinking. A consistent finding is that depressed and
suicidal individuals differ from controls by their lack of
positive thoughts about the future while being no
different in the number of negative thoughts they
are able to generate (MacLeod & Byrne, 1996;
MacLeod, Pankhania, Lee, & Mitchell, 1997;
MacLeod & Salaminiou, 2001; MacLeod, Tata,
Kentish, & Jacobsen, 1997). Moreover, anxiety seems
to be associated with an increase in negative future
MTT but not fewer positive projections (Andersson,
Kyrre Svalastog, Kaldo, & Sarkohi, 2007; MacLeod &
Byrne, 1996; MacLeod et al., 1997). This finding is also
observed at the personality level with healthy indivi-
duals where anxiety-related dimensions, namely neu-
roticism and harm avoidance, were found to predict
the amount of negative future projections (Quoidbach,
Hansenne, & Mottet, 2008). These findings further
strengthen the importance of positive future-directed
thinking to well-being and happiness. However,
whereas findings relating positive future thinking and
happiness are relatively unambiguous, it should be
mentioned that negative future thinking does not
always have negative effects. Indeed, anticipating
unpleasant events can minimize their impact. Arntz,
van Eck, and de Jong (1992) showed that subjects who
received electric shocks of unpredictable intensity to
their right ankle (i.e., 17 painful electrical stimulations
of medium intensity, alternated with only three strong
stimulations) had higher subjective fear ratings and
autonomic responses (skin conductance response,
heart rate, and respiration) than the matched controls
who received 20 predictable strong stimulations. The
inability to anticipate a slightly negative future event
makes it more painful than an anticipated considerably
negative event. In addition, negative future thinking
helps to develop prudent and prophylactic behaviors
(Gilbert, 2006). Finally, studies on defensive pessimism
show that mentally playing through or reflecting on all
the possible negative outcomes for a given situation
helps anxious individuals to manage their anxiety, and
so it does not interfere with their performance (see for
a review Norem & Chang, 2002).
Foundationally, research on MTT into the future
and well-being must address the issue of whether
positive or negative episodic future thinking is a cause
of happiness or anxiety, per se, or merely a side effect
that people with high or low well-being frequently
experience. Indeed, previous studies on the topic have
only been correlational. Of course, the most direct
and unambiguous way to determine whether MTT
exerts a causal effect on happiness and anxiety would
be in the context of experimental studies in which
MTT was manipulated and its effects on measures of
happiness and anxiety were observed. This is the
purpose of the present study. More specifically, we
address whether focusing on positive, negative, or
neutral future thinking will lead to different levels of
happiness and anxiety. Based on the above findings,
we predict that self-guided, positive MTT daily
exercises will lead to heightened happiness over a
2-week period relative to a focus on negative or
neutral projections. As previous findings are contro-
versial concerning negative future thinking and
anxiety, showing both that negative MTT is related
to high anxiety and that it can sometimes reduce it,
the investigation of the effect of the daily practice of
MTT on anxiety is purely exploratory.
Method
Participants
Subjects in the present study were recruited from the
local university workers via an intranet advertisement
asking them to participate in a study on how people
imagine the future. A total of 210 healthy adults
originally indicated their willingness to participate in
the study by completing the baseline measures of
350 J. Quoidbach et al.
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happiness and anxiety, and were randomly assigned to
one of the three experimental groups (positive projec-
tion, negative projection, and neutral projection) or to
the control group (no projection). Attrition was quite
prevalent in the experimental groups. Forty-three
participants never started the actual study and another
61 subjects were dropped from data analysis because of
missing or incomplete data,
1
leaving a total of 106
participants. This was not surprising given the
demanding daily nature of the task and the fact that
these subjects were unpaid volunteers. However, there
were no group differences in the exclusion/dropout rate
for each experimental group (
2
¼0.42; p¼0.98) and
no differences between subjects who dropped out and
those who did not regarding their initial level of
happiness and anxiety (p¼0.70 and p¼0.85, respec-
tively). The effective sample was made up of 69 women
with a mean age of 31.2 years (SD ¼10.76) and 37 men
with a mean age of 35.03 years (SD ¼14.8). The
experimental groups were composed of 15 subjects
(6 men) for the positive projection group, 16 subjects
(7 men) for the negative projection group, and 18
subjects (5 men) for the neutral projection group. The
control group was made up of 57 subjects (19 men). All
participants gave written, informed consent to partic-
ipate in the study.
Procedure
After being given instructions and information about
the study procedure, participants were provided with
an individual login and password for the study website.
Participants were then invited when they first logged
on to complete the pre-test, which consisted of an
online version of the Subjective Happiness Scale
(Lyubomirsky & Lepper, 1999) and of the State Trait
Anxiety Inventory (Spielberger, 1983). After that,
participants started receiving emails every day with a
link to their online daily projection questionnaire. A
first, reminding email was sent to every participant at
5 p.m. and another one was sent at 8 p.m. to
participants who had not yet completed their ques-
tionnaire. Participants had to complete their daily
questionnaire between 5 p.m. and midnight for 15
consecutive days. The first day was considered a
practice day and was not counted in the observation
period, resulting in a total of 14 daily reports that were
used in the analyses. Finally, participants were
contacted by email and asked to complete once again
the happiness and anxiety scales on the day following
their last daily questionnaire (post-test).
Conditions
Beside the control group that did no intervention and
just had to complete the happiness and anxiety scales
twice in a 15-day interval, participants were randomly
assigned by the website program to one of the three
experimental conditions (positive, negative, or neutral
projections) and were provided with one of the three
following instructions:
(1) ‘Please try to imagine, in the most precise way,
four positive events that could reasonably happen
to you tomorrow. You can imagine all kinds of
positive events, from simple everyday pleasures
to very important positive events.’ Examples of
positive events imagined by participants were
as follows: ‘Before going to bed I could get an
SMS from my ex-boyfriend,’ ‘I can see myself
savoring meatballs and French fries at the
Rendez-Vous Cafe
´with my friend Evelyne
right after our Pilates workout at the gym’,
and ‘After a great job interview, the boss of the
company I applied to work for will tell me I got
the job.
(2) ‘Please try to imagine in the most precise way,
four negative events that could reasonably
happen to you tomorrow. You can imagine all
kinds of negative events, from everyday hassles
to very important negative events.’ Examples of
negative events imagined by participants were
as follows: ‘My hairdresser will ruin my hair
tomorrow while I’m already in a hurry for
Julie’s wedding,’ ‘When I take a shower
tomorrow morning, the water will suddenly
turn very cold for a few seconds,’ and ‘My
doctor will inform me that he just got the
results of the medical exam and that my recent
sight problem is caused by a tumor.’
(3) ‘Please try to imagine, in the most precise way,
four neutral and routine events that could
reasonably happen to you tomorrow. Imagined
events have to be things really neutral that you
are used to doing such as taking a shower, tying
your shoe laces, or turning on your computer.’
Examples of neutral events imagined by parti-
cipants were as follows: ‘waking up at 9 a.m.,’
‘borrowing my friend’s cognitive neuroscience
book,’ ‘taking the bus to work’, and ‘brushing
my teeth.’
Depending on the condition, one of these instruc-
tions was written on the daily questionnaire, followed
by general additional instructions reminding partici-
pants that imagined events had to be specific (i.e., they
had to take place in a specific place at a specific
moment) and inviting them to take the time to think of
elements, namely, phenomenal characteristics, such as
where and when the event could take place, the people
and objects surrounding, other sensory details such as
sounds or smells, and emotions they could feel.
Instructions were followed by four blank
text boxes for participants to write a brief summary
The Journal of Positive Psychology 351
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of their future projections. For each projection,
participants were also asked to rate emotions they
would experience if the event was actually taking
place, on a 7-point scale ranging from 3 (extremely
negative) to þ3 (extremely positive).
Happiness
Happiness was assessed by a French back-translated
version of the Subjective Happiness Scale
(Lyubomirsky & Lepper, 1999). The measure is com-
posed of four items and uses a 7-point Likert-type
scale. Examples of items include ‘Compared to most of
my peers, I consider myself (from 1¼less happy to
7¼more happy)’ or ‘Some people are generally not very
happy. Although they are not depressed, they never seem
as happy as they might be. To what extent does this
characterization describe you?(from 1¼not at all to
7¼a great deal).’ Lyubomirsky and Lepper (1999)
reported good internal consistency with alpha ()
ranging from 0.79 to 0.94. The internal consistency of
the French translation of the scale used in our sample
was also good with of 0.81.
Anxiety
Anxiety was assessed with the State-Trait Anxiety
Inventory (STAI) (Spielberger, 1983). The STAI
consists of two 20-item scales: the state and trait
anxiety scales. The trait anxiety (STAI-T) scale was
used in the current study and considers long-term
manifestations of anxiety. Items are rated on a 4-point
Likert scale (from ‘almost never,’ to ’almost always’).
The validated French version of the STAI has excellent
internal consistency and high retest reliability
(Schweitzer & Paulhan, 1990). The Cronbach’s alpha
() for the STAI-T in the current study was 0.94.
Results
Manipulation check
As a reminder, participants were asked to rate for each
projection emotions they would experience if the event
were actually taking place. In order to check whether
each experimental condition (i.e., positive projection,
negative projection, and neutral projection) effectively
elicited differential emotional valence in projections, a
one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was conducted
with the mean daily rating of emotional content of
projections as the dependent variable and the three
experimental conditions as the three levels of the
independent variable. The means and standard devia-
tions of the mean emotion of projections are depicted in
Table 1. Results showed that the manipulation was
effective, as the three experimental groups effectively
differed on the emotional content of their daily
projections (F(2, 46) ¼198.48, p50.0001). Post hoc
comparisons revealed that the positive group signifi-
cantly differed from the negative (p50.001) and the
neutral group (p50.001), and the negative group
significantly differed from the neutral group (p50.001).
In addition, there were no significant differences
between the four groups regarding their basic level of
happiness (F(3, 102) ¼0.31, p¼0.82) and anxiety
(F(3, 102) ¼1.40, p¼0.25).
Subjective happiness
Scores on subjective happiness scales for each group
before and after 2 weeks of daily projection are
presented in Figure 1. A two-way, repeated-measures
ANOVA with the factor of time as within factor and
with projection condition as between-subjects factor
was conducted. Results shows a significant effect of
time (F(1, 102) ¼7.87, p50.01) and a significant inter-
action (F(3, 102) ¼2.87, p¼0.04).
Table 1. Effect of experimental condition on 15-day mean emotion elicited by projections.
Positive
projection
Negative
projection
Neutral
projections F(2, 50) p
Mean emotion elicited
by projections
1.81 1.5 0.63 200.49 50.0000
SD 0.51 0.49 0.44
18
18.5
19
19.5
20
20.5
21
21.5
22
22.5
23
Pre-test Post-test
Time
Happiness
Positive
Negative
Neutral
Control
Figure 1. Effect of MTT intervention on happiness across
experimental conditions.
352 J. Quoidbach et al.
Downloaded By: [Canadian Research Knowledge Network] At: 17:09 11 August 2009
Comparisons yielded a significant increase in hap-
piness for the positive projection group (F(1, 102) ¼
8.13, p50.01). Modifications in the level of happiness
after the 2-week program for the negative projection
group (F(1, 102) ¼2.59, p¼0.11), the neutral projec-
tion group (F(1, 102) ¼0.58, p¼0.45), and the control
group (F(1, 102) ¼0.18, p¼0.67) were not significant.
Anxiety
Mean STAI scores for each group before and after the
2-week daily projection are presented in Figure 2. A
two-way, repeated-measures ANOVA with the factor
of time as within factor and with projection condition
as between-subjects factor was conducted. Results
yielded no significant effect of time (F(1, 102) ¼3.13,
p¼0.08) and no significant interaction either
(F(3, 102) ¼1.24, p¼0.30). Because there is a trend
toward significance for an effect of time, additional
comparisons were conducted. These analyses revealed a
significant reduction of anxiety in the neutral projection
group (F(1, 102) ¼5.64, p50.02) but no significant
changes in the positive group (F(1, 102) ¼0.11, p¼
0.75), the negative group (F(1, 102) ¼0.14, p¼0.71), or
the control group (F(1, 102) ¼2.90, p¼0.09).
Discussion
Understanding the roots of well-being and scientifi-
cally developing and validating activities to improve it
are among the main goals of positive psychology. The
first purpose of the present study was to investigate the
direction of the causal relationship between MTT into
the future and happiness; that is, to examine whether
purposely engaging in positive future thinking could
boost one’s subjective sense of happiness over 15 days.
Results show that while participants who had to
imagine everyday neutral or negative events showed
no significant increase in their levels of happiness,
subjects in the positive condition were significantly
happier than 2 weeks earlier. This suggests that
positive episodic future thinking is not just a conse-
quence of happiness and might be related to well-being
in a causal fashion. Therefore, this intervention could
be usefully added to the growing number of scientif-
ically validated self-help tools (e.g., Emmons &
McCullough, 2003; Lyubomirsky, 2008), and further
studies should investigate its effect on depressed
patients. Additionally, though the relationship between
future MTT and well-being is well established (e.g.,
MacLeod & Conway, 2005; MacLeod & Salaminiou,
2001), the present research cannot exclude the possi-
bility that the observed increase in happiness is due to
the fact that participants in the positive MTT condi-
tion also had more positive cognitions and experiences
than the other groups. Future research should include
another positive cognitions control condition in order
to establish with certainty the specific key role played
by MTT. However, it should be mentioned that the
present results, though not significant, show a surpris-
ing increase in happiness in the negative condition.
A possible explanation could be that most of the
negative events imagined in the negative group did not
actually happen, a fact that could have led participants
to evaluate themselves as relatively lucky and, there-
fore, happy people. This finding raises the question of
how MTT might interact with affective forecasting.
For example, is the mere anticipation of good events
enough to increase happiness? Do imagined positive
events still lead to happiness when one is disappointed
by the actual events (as has been shown in research on
affective forecasting bias; see Wilson and Gilbert,
2005)? The differential impact of imagining events that
do or do not happen could be interestingly investigated
in the future.
The second aim of this study was to investigate the
effects of all three types of MTT into the future on
anxiety. No particular hypotheses were formulated at
this level given the fact that, though negative future
thinking seems to be associated with anxiety at the
clinical level (MacLeod & Byrne, 1996) and the
personality level (Quoidbach et al., 2008), it was also
found to be a way to cope with anxiety in some other
cases (Arntz et al., 1992; Norem & Chang, 2002). In the
present study, neither positive nor negative future
thinking practices had influence on levels of anxiety.
This absence of effect in the negative MTT group
seems to indicate that intentional negative future
thinking does not directly cause anxiety. Negative
thoughts about the future might therefore be
consequences rather than causes of trait anxiety.
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
Pre-test Post-test
Time
Anxiety
Positive
Negative
Neutral
Control
Figure 2. Effect of MTT practice on anxiety across exper-
imental conditions.
The Journal of Positive Psychology 353
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Hence, the frequently observed relationship between
negative future thinking and anxiety (MacLeod &
Byrne, 1996; MacLeod et al., 1997; MacLeod &
Salaminiou, 2001; MacLeod et al., 1997; Quoidbach
et al., 2008) might be explained by the fact that
imagined negative events affect anxious people more
than others, either because the negative things they
think of are worse or because they are more sensitive
and therefore the subjective impact is greater, or both
these causes may apply. This explanation is in line with
recent findings indicating that subjects who scored high
in neuroticism experienced more emotion while ima-
gining negative future events (Quoidbach et al., 2008).
Unexpectedly, participants in the neutral MTT
group did show a significant reduction of their levels of
anxiety. This surprising result has yet to be explained,
as most of the literature on MTT and anxiety addresses
anticipation of negative events. A possible explanation
of this effect might lie in the structuring nature of
neutral MTT. Indeed, a qualitative analysis of the
written projections, using a formal coding procedure,
revealed that the content of subjects’ projections in the
neutral group were mainly related to daily routines
such as driving, eating or washing oneself (52%) and to
planning (i.e., things participants had to do the next
day such as going to the grocery store, picking up
children from school, or paying a visit to friends or
relatives; 44%). Thus, mentally preparing for and
organizing the upcoming day might have a significant
reducing effect on stress. This finding is in line with
previous findings that improving individuals’ planning
abilities reduces negative affect (MacLeod, Coates, &
Hetherton, 2008). Further studies could investigate this
kind of MTT as a way to cope with anxiety.
Before we conclude, several limitations of the
present study should be mentioned. First, the attrition
rate in the present study was quite high and, even
though there were no group differences in the
exclusion/dropout rate for each experimental group,
a possible selection effect cannot be excluded. Second,
the Nof the study is a bit small, though the statistical
analysis shows that it is large enough to obtain
significant results.
Acknowledgement
This research was supported by the French Community of
Belgium (ARC 06/11-340).
Note
1. Due to the study website software requirements,
participants could only complete post-test happiness
and anxiety scales if they had completed all of their 15
daily questionnaires.
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