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Category: Project

Description: Previous research has shown that depression is associated with a negative thinking style, whereby individuals hold negative views about themselves, the world, and the future. Moreover, it has been argued that holding negative views about the future is a key factor in causing and maintaining depressive episodes (Roepke & Seligman, 2015). The research conducted within this project builds on our lab’s previous findings (Boland et al, 2018) that views about the future can be made less negative by "Positive Simulation Training" (PST), whereby individuals repeatedly engage in positive episodic simulations about potential future events. This research found that PST led to improvements in participants' expectations about the future events, compared to a neutral visualisation task. Positive future events were rated as more likely to occur and negative events less likely, and individuals rated themselves as having more control over both positive and negative future events. These effects were observed in individuals with and without elevated levels of depressive symptomatology. Across six experiments, the project extended our preliminary findings with further explorations of the effects of PST: Experiments 1a and 1b compared the effects of four different versions of PST, relative to a neutral visualisation task, on future event expectancies (likelihood of occurrence, controllability, importance, anticipated happiness, anticipated disappointment). The core aim of these two experiments was to establish whether any one form of Positive Simulation Training modifies future event expectancies more than others. Experiments 2 and 3 extended this to investigate the impact of PST on expectancies for personally relevant vs. irrelevant events (Exp. 2) and for personal goals (Exp. 3). The aims of these experiments were to establish whether PST lead to more positive views about future events that are personally important. Experiments 4 and 5 investigated the impact of PST on dispositional optimism, by exploring whether the effects of PST extend beyond material that is explicitly related to that simulated during training. Experiment 4 explored whether PST modified responses on an implicit measure of future expectancies whilst Experiment 5 examined the effects of PST on anticipated emotions/affective forecasts within a laboratory game of chance involving monetary wins/losses.