Future thinking is a key process in a range of adaptive behaviours. Although future thinking has been increasingly researched in the context of psychopathology, there are few studies that have taken a functional perspective. This talk examines the self-reported frequency of various functions of future thinking across three case-control studies (depression, generalised anxiety, and pathological worry) from the Australian and Iranian context. Key differences in the functions of future thinking are noted within and across the studies, as well as the incremental validity of assessing the functions of future thinking with respect to transdiagnostic factors underlying psychopathology.

20% of women experience at least one anxiety disorder during pregnancy and mental health conditions account for 10% of women’s deaths during pregnancy. There is an urgent need for evidence based interventions to reduce this anxiety. An episodic future thinking intervention that increases the specificity of future simulations was tested, where 176 soon to be first time mothers were recruited to one of two conditions: an intervention condition where the women imagined childbirth and the first day at home with their baby using a series of prompts to increase the specificity of their EFT simulations and a control group where they imagined these events without the prompts. Those in the intervention condition had significantly lower post-simulation anxiety ratings vs pre-simulation ratings, and significantly lower than the control group. This suggests that increasing the specificity in simulations of the future is an effective way to reduce anxiety in soon-to-be first-time mothers.

Protection Motivation Theory (PMT; Rogers, 1975)—a popular framework for modelling protective decision-making in fields like cybersecurity—suggests that intentions and subsequent behaviours are driven by a combination of cognitive appraisals: threat severity, susceptibility, self-efficacy, and response efficacy. Across several studies, we examined whether Episodic Future Thinking (EFT)—a form of prospective simulation—can improve intentions via self-efficacy, leading to more secure behaviour. Our findings highlight the pivotal role of EFT in increasing intentions. However, contrary to PMT, intentions increased independently of self-efficacy and threat, with cybersecurity knowledge consistently mitigating these effects. Meta-analytic structural equation modelling confirmed these findings, showing a poor fit for the original PMT framework but significant improvement when incorporating a direct knowledge-intentions pathway. A systematic literature review further identified critical gaps in PMT research, particularly regarding the integration of knowledge as a key variable. Based on these findings, we present a refined version of the PMT model.

Mental time travel – the ability to remember past events and imagine future events on a personal timeline - is well-characterised in cognitive science. A similar, but less-understood, ability is that of collective memory and collective future thinking, termed collective mental time travel (CMTT). In two studies, we examined the effect of Event type (collective, personal; between-groups) and Temporality (past, future; within-groups) on quantities of episodic and non-episodic details (using the Internal-External Levine et al (2002) scheme). Personal events contained more episodic detail compared to collective events, and past events were associated with more episodic detail than future events. Additionally, we observed a positive correlation between the episodicity of the past and the future supporting the constructive episodic theory at the collective level. These findings initiate a deeper understanding of the underlying cognitive processes that enable humans to engage in collective mental time travel.