The Influence Of Episodic Future Thinking On Delay Discounting In College Students

Episodic future thinking is the ability to project oneself into the future to preexperience an event.Delay discounting is the rate that individuals devalue future rewards subjectively as the delay time getting longer.Delay discounting has been thought to be the “marker” of impulsitivity.Some studies have shown that episodic future thinking could reduce impulsitivity to choose the immediate rewards in the delay discounting task.However,there are still some unsolved problems.First,whether the context of episodic future thinking and delay discounting are relative or not could make the influence difference is unkown.And among the studies,they have studied the impact of different dimentions of emotion—valence or intensity when individuals thinking on delay discounting,but none of them had studied them together and none of them tried to promote paticipants' different emotional valence.What's more,the results about the impact of intensity of emotion and vivideness of episodic future thinking on reducing delay discounting were inconsistent.And the influences of individuals epsodic future thinking ability,inhibition controland working memory on the relation between episodic future thinking and delay discounting is unknown.To clarify the questions above,87 ungraduate participants were randomrized to visualize positive-,negative-or neutral-valenced promotion groups.And they were asked to go through episodic future thinking with the place cue provided in the experiment.Different groups were asked to image the future event in different emotion.And for each participant,in half of the trails the contexts between episodic future thinking and delay discounting were relative,which they were asked to visualize the events they could buy in the place;in the other half of the trails,they were asked to visualize thearticals that could be around them in the place,which meant the context between episodic future thinking and delay discounting were unrelative.After the episodic thinking,they were asked to choose between an immediate rewards and a delayed rewards which was bigger,and then they evaluated the degree of positivity and vivideness they felt in the episodic future thinking they just finished.And ability of epsodic future thinking,inhibitory control and wording memory capacity were assessed to study the relationship between these three and delay discounting in the experiment.The results indicated that the relativeness of context couldn't change the degree of reduction in delay discounting.And positive-valenced episodic future thinking could significant reduce delay discounting than negative-valenced,and the influence was better when the context between episodic future thinking and delay discounting was relative.But the results showed that the intensity of emotion and vivideness of episodic future thinking wasn't related to the performance in the delay discounting.And the ability of individuals episodic future thinking,inhibition control and working memory were not related to the perfomance of participants.But we did find that the ability of individuals episodic future thinking was positively related to vividness they felt when they were doing episodic future thinking.