ArticlePloS one2023
Physiological and subjective arousal to prospective mental imagery: A mechanism for behavioral change?
Article in PloS one, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- Real-time fMRI-triggered experience-sampling: a proof-of-concept study.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Time to think of love, leisure, terror, and despair: emotional imagery affects temporal cognition.Psychological research · 2026Article
- The Relationship Between Emotion Processing Assessed by an Affect Rating Task and Depression Symptoms Following the Accelerated Sequential Dorsolateral-Dorsomedial Prefrontal rTMS Treatment.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Neural Sensitivity to the Heartbeat Is Modulated by Fluctuations in Affective Arousal during Spontaneous Thought.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Neural sensitivity to the heartbeat is modulated by fluctuations in affective arousal during spontaneous thought.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Real-time fMRI-triggered experience sampling: A proof-of-concept study.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.)Article
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Abstract
Emotional prospective mental imagery, in which we simulate possible future events within our minds, have a pronounced impact on behavior. For example, repeated engagement in positive prospective imagery can lead to behavioral activation, while negative prospective imagery can lead to catastrophizing and avoidance. Physiological arousal boosts memory consolidation, creating emotional memories. Thus, if emotional prospective imagery produces an arousal response, the memory consolidation of these simulations of the future may be boosted, offering a possible underlying mechanism for the impact of emotional prospective imagery on behavior. In order to examine the feasibility of arousal as a possible mechanism behind the impact of emotional prospective imagery on behavior, sixty participants produced autobiographical prospective imagery of 30 scenes (10 positive, 10 neutral, and 10 negative), during which arousal responses (skin conductance) were measured, and ratings for subjective arousal, valence, and imagery vividness were collected. Moreover, because vividness of prospective imagery has been related to anxiety and depression, the study examined this relation also for event-related autobiographical prospective imagery. The results showed that emotional prospective imagery were associated with higher subjective arousal ratings as compared to neutral imagery. Physiological arousal responses showed a similar pattern, but further data is needed for a firm conclusion. Nevertheless, arousal-boosted consolidation remains a possible contributing mechanism for the impact of emotional prospective imagery on behavior. Moreover, results suggest both anxiety and depression may entail a reduced ability to invent prospective life situations. However, only anxiety was associated with less vivid imaginations, unless the imaginations were of negative content. Hence, anxious individuals may experience negative prospective imagery more vividly than imagery with neutral and positive content.
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