Looking Forward to It: Investigating the Role of Anhedonia in Episodic future Thinking

Episodic future thinking, or our ability to simulate personal future events, is implicated in a range of important functioning from problem solving to emotion regulation. However, individuals with clinical diagnoses like depression and schizophrenia struggle to produce future thinking that is vivid and detailed. While these deficits mirror well-document autobiographical memory deficits, they remain poorly understood. The current study aimed to examine the role of anhedonia in episodic future thinking vividness using a within-subjects dimensional approach. A mixed sample of sixty-five undergraduate students and community adults completed two future thinking tasks and one autobiographical memory across two study visits, during which participants were prompted to generate a total of twelve specific future narratives and six specific memory narratives across positive, negative, and neutral valances. Participants completed self-reported clinical status measures including an anhedonia scale at each study visit. Multilevel models demonstrated that anhedonia symptom severity predicted subjective vividness across in future thinking narratives. This remained true even after controlling for depression. Our experimental manipulation of preceding a future thinking task with a memory task (as opposed to a control task) did not prompt participants to generate future thinking that was rated as more vivid. Finally, anhedonia severity predicted self-reported positive, but not negative, affect during our future thinking task, providing further evidence for the delineation of the positive and negative affect systems While future research is warranted, result provides preliminary evidence for the unique role of anhedonia in observed future thinking deficits related to mental imagery observed across diagnoses.