ArticleJournal of behavior therapy and experimental psychiatry2024
Associations between PTSD and temporal discounting: The role of future thinking.
Article in Journal of behavior therapy and experimental psychiatry, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
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Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- Identifying significant environmental predictors of change in delay discounting among adolescents in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study.Experimental and clinical psychopharmacology · 2026Article
- Scoping review of episodic future thinking and delay discounting observed in Alzheimer's disease, depression, and PTSD.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
BACKGROUND AND
objectivesDespite documented alterations in future thinking in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), our understanding of how individuals with PTSD make future-oriented decisions is limited. We tested the hypothesis that increased discounting in association with PTSD reflects failure to spontaneously envision future rewarding situations.
methodsThirty-seven trauma exposed war-zone veterans completed a standard temporal discounting task as well as a temporal discounting task accompanied by episodic future thinking cues.
resultsSeverity of PTSD symptoms was associated with preference for sooner, smaller rewards in the standard task. Consistent with our hypothesis, when participants engaged in future thinking, greater PTSD symptom severity was no longer associated with steeper discounting. Moreover, difficulty anticipating future events, as measured contemporaneously in a separate task (Verfaellie et al., 2024), mediated the relationship between PTSD symptom severity and degree of discounting in the standard task. Among PTSD symptom clusters, the severity of avoidance and negative alterations in cognition and mood was related to steeper discounting. Measures of depression and alcohol use were not associated with discounting. LIMITATIONS: The sample included mostly male, predominantly White veterans who experienced primarily combat-related trauma.
conclusionsPTSD-associated alterations in temporal discounting reflect failure to spontaneously imagine future positive events. Two common correlates of PTSD, depression and alcohol use, could not account for the observed associations between PTSD and future-oriented decisions.
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