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The tendency for experiencing involuntary future and past mental time travel is robustly related to thought suppression: an exploratory study

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Abstract

Involuntary mental time travel (MTT) refers to projecting oneself into the past or into the future without prior conscious effort. The previous studies have shown high inter-individual variability in the frequency of involuntary MTT, but a few systematic studies exist. In three exploratory studies, we investigated the relation between individual differences in experiencing involuntary past and future MTT, and selected emotional and cognitive processes, with a special focus on thought suppression. Across all three studies, thought suppression emerged as a robust predictor of involuntary MTT above and beyond emotion-related variables, mind-wandering, daydreaming styles, and demographic variables. Findings from Studies 1 and 2 showed that higher thought suppression consistently predicted both more frequent involuntary past and future MTT across an American and a Danish sample, whereas rumination and emotion regulation were less consistently related to involuntary MTT. In Study 3, thought suppression reliably predicted more frequent involuntary MTT, even when controlling for mind-wandering, as well as for positive and negative daydreaming styles, which were all related to greater involuntary MTT. Overall, the individual differences assessed showed similar relationships to the tendency for having past and future involuntary MTT, with the possible exception of daydreaming styles, which appeared more strongly related to future-directed involuntary MTT.

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Data availability

The data sets during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author upon request.

Notes

  1. The following steps were taken to increase the reliability of the data collection process. First, the entire survey consisted of 275 single items, and thus, it was determined that spending a minimum of 8 min answering the survey was a mandatory inclusion criterion (1.5 s per item plus instructions). Note that some of the questionnaires in the survey were not analyzed for the present study; however, the 8-min rule was based on the entire set of questionnaires completed by participants. Second, an attention check was inserted in the IAMI collected via Amazon MTurk (“If you are reading this item attentively, select the last option ‘Once an hour or more’”). Of the original 510 participants, 42 (8.2%) completed the survey in less than 8 min. Forty additional participants (7.8% of the 510) did not pass the attention check, thus resulting in N = 428.

  2. The entire survey consisted of 275 single items. All Danish participants took 8 min or more in the survey (N = 481); thus, we did not eliminate anybody because of speed. We did not employ an attention check for the Danish participants; thus, data from all 481 Danish participants were analyzed. The data from this sample derived from two other larger projects and, thus, the questionnaires were given in two different orders. (Analyses not overlap** with the present study are published in del Palacio-Gonzalez & Berntsen, 2018b.)

  3. The data preparation for Study 3 followed the same steps as Study 1. With 127 items, we estimated that the minimum time required to answer the survey was 4 min. Note that the entire survey was shorter than that of Studies 1 and 2, and we analyzed data from all questionnaires. Initially, 567 participants accessed the survey, of which 7.9% (n = 45) were too fast. An additional 5.6 % of the original (n = 32) did not pass the attention check, thus leaving a final sample of 490 participants for analysis.

  4. The variance corresponds to the ΔR2 and sr2 explained by the MWQ in an additional model in which the MWQ was entered alone after the SIPI subscales. The model is not reported in the manuscript, but is available upon request.

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Funding

This work was supported by the Danish National Research Foundation (DNRF) under Grant DNRF89. The DNRF had no involvement in the design of the current study or the interpretation of the results.

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  1. Department of Psychology and Behavioural Sciences, Center on Autobiographical Memory Research, Aarhus University, Bartholins Allé 9, 1351, 8000, Arhus C, Denmark

    Adriana del Palacio-Gonzalez & Dorthe Berntsen

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  1. Adriana del Palacio-Gonzalez
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  2. Dorthe Berntsen
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Correspondence to Adriana del Palacio-Gonzalez.

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del Palacio-Gonzalez, A., Berntsen, D. The tendency for experiencing involuntary future and past mental time travel is robustly related to thought suppression: an exploratory study. Psychological Research 83, 788–804 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-018-1132-2

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