The Eye of Emotion: Eye Movement During Emotional Future Thinking

Future thinking is intimately linked with emotions, as projecting oneself into the future typically involves a construction of positive situations that one strives to achieve or negative situations that one seeks to avoid. Therefore, the current study evaluated eye movement during neutral, positive, and negative future thinking. We invited participants to imagine neutral, past, and negative future events while their scan path was recorded by an eye tracker. The analysis demonstrated more and shorter fixations during positive and negative emotional thinking than during neutral future thinking. No statistically significant differences were observed between neutral and positive or negative future thinking regarding the number, duration, or amplitude of the saccades. Comparisons between positive and negative future thinking demonstrated no significant differences on the characteristics of fixations or saccades. Compared to neutral future thinking, emotional future thinking may involve less complex visual representation. However, positive and negative future thinking may trigger similar processing of visual representations.