Mental time travel is important for understanding cognition, culture, and well-being. This preregistered study was the first to examine mental time travel among Native Americans, exploring the relationship between mental health (both positive and negative) and collective mental time travel at the ethnicity level. Participants completed a fluency task generating positive and negative personal and collective events from the past and future, along with measures of ethnic identity (enculturation, identity centrality), depression, anxiety, and life satisfaction. Personal mental time travel to the past was associated with mental health indicators, while collective mental time travel was not. Native Americans demonstrated a negativity bias for collective events but neutrality for personal events. Stronger ethnic identity correlated with positive collective events but not negative ones. The results highlight functional differences in personal and collective mental time travel, offering insights into its role in identity and mental health in the indigenous cultural context.

Previous studies have shown that remembered failures differ based on severity and ownership. This study investigated the timing of these failures by analysing 343 cases according to their severity and ownership. The cases were classified based on the time of occurrence: in 2019 when the survey was conducted, one–two years prior, and before 2016. A chi-square test revealed significant differences in timing. Residual analysis showed that severe failures were remembered less frequently during the survey year than at other times. Severe failures of others were remembered more frequently over three years ago, whereas trivial failures were remembered more often in the survey year. Further, infrequent severe failures are more broadly remembered from their lives than other failures. This implies that severe personal failure may prompt extensive remembering of one's life rather than just recent memories, as it may pertain to a memorable autobiographical event.

Remembering the past and imagining the future are strongly intertwined. However, research comparing simulations and memories before and after a single event has been rare. Furthermore, it remains unclear whether memories of future simulations underlie self-congruency biases. In three longitudinal studies polling participants before and after the EU, UK, and US elections, respectively, we found that regardless of election result, memories were more vivid than simulations. Furthermore, we found evidence for self-protective biases, with a decrease in perceived importance of the election when one’s own party was unsuccessful. In Study 3, we also assessed memory for the simulation before the election. This showed a strong effect of congruence with current attitudes, for instance with Republicans overestimating how fair they thought the election was going to be. The results show phenomenological differences between remembering and simulating and show that memory traces of the simulation are distorted in accordance with current attitudes.

The current research examined the relationship between visual perspective and psychological distance. The third person perspective is associated with increased psychological distance to an event. In the first study, participants recalled in detail autobiographical memories in response to experimenter-generated cues. In the second study, participants described in detail future episodic events to the same experimenter-generated cues. ChatGPT was utilized to measure themes in the descriptions provided by participants that related to psychological distance. LWIC was utilized to examine the frequency of words associated with psychological distance in the descriptions. We compared the results of the qualitative linguistic analysis with the results obtained using traditional quantitative self-report ratings.