Discrete Emotions Caused by Episodic Future Thinking: A Systematic Review With Narrative Synthesis
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Engaging in episodic future thinking, where a person imagines a specific, personal future, influences decisions partly through evoking affective experiences. While there is a growing literature on how future thinking influences affect, few studies have assessed this effect on discrete emotions. In this systematic review, we examined studies assessing the effects of episodic future thinking on discrete emotions. The aim was to provide an overview of which emotions have been studied, the evidence for an effect of future thinking on emotions, and the characteristics of emotional, episodic future thoughts. We identified 12 experimental studies (N = 2825) and synthesized these narratively. Findings suggest that episodic future thinking has some influence on several different emotions, including happiness, anxiety, and sadness. While the effects for most emotions were inconsistent, consistent effects were found for enjoyment and compassion. Imagining positive, personal future events can evoke enjoyment. Similarly, imagining instances of helping others in the future can elicit compassion. We suggest possible explanations for why future thinking only consistently influences some discrete emotions, emphasizing the cognitive appraisals and behavioral functions associated with different discrete emotions. We provide suggestions for empirically assessing effects of episodic future thinking on discrete emotions in future research.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.041 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it