Change Your Mind… Or Mind Your Change? Mental Imagery as an Individual Factor in the Emotional Regulation of Loss Aversion

Loss aversion, the tendency to avoid risky mixed gain-loss gambles, is thought to reflect increased emotional arousal at the prospect of losses. Although emotional regulation strategies can reduce loss aversion, these effects vary substantially across individuals. One potential factor in this process is mental imagery, the experience of internal perceptual representation in the absence of external sensory input. Given that mental imagery has been proposed to amplify emotional responses, we examined whether individual differences in mental imagery strength contribute to variability in emotional regulation of loss aversion. Participants (n = 65) completed a gambling task both while responding naturally and while using a reappraisal prompt in which they were instructed to imagine themselves as professional traders. Mental imagery ability was assessed using self-report measures. We hypothesized that greater mental imagery ability would predict greater baseline loss aversion, reflecting amplification of negative emotional responses to loss, and greater reductions in loss aversion during reappraisal, due to an enhanced ability to mentally simulate being a professional trader. Consistent with previous findings, participants significantly reduced their loss aversion during reappraisal. However, contrary to our other hypotheses, greater visual imagery ability was linked to lower baseline levels of loss aversion and smaller reductions in loss aversion during reappraisal. These results suggest that mental imagery does not inherently amplify negative emotional responses to risky gambles with the prospect of loss, as originally thought. Instead, mental imagery may play an adaptive role in decision-making, enabling more balanced evaluations of potential outcomes, even without explicit regulation prompts.