Mental Time Travel: Thoughts about the present (on average highly happy & pleasant but low in meaningfulness) were frequent, thoughts about the future also were common, thoughts about the past were rare

Everyday Thoughts in Time: Experience Sampling Studies of Mental Time Travel. Roy F. Baumeister et al. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, March 25, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167220908411

Abstract: Time is among the most important yet mysterious aspects of experience. We investigated everyday mental time travel, especially into the future. Two community samples, contacted at random points for 3 (Study 1; 6,686 reports) and 14 days (Study 2; 2,361 reports), reported on their most recent thought. Both studies found that thoughts about the present were frequent, thoughts about the future also were common, whereas thoughts about the past were rare. Thoughts about the present were on average highly happy and pleasant but low in meaningfulness. Pragmatic prospection (thoughts preparing for action) was evident in thoughts about planning and goals. Thoughts with no time aspect were lower in sociality and experiential richness. Thoughts about the past were relatively unpleasant and involuntary. Subjective experiences of thinking about past and future often were similar—while both differed from present focus, consistent with views that memory and prospection use similar mental structures.

Keywords: time, prospection, social cognition, future

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Branch, Jared. 2020. “Involuntary Mental Time Travel into the Episodic Future, Episodic Past, and Episodic Counterfactual Past in Everyday Life.” PsyArXiv. January 27. https://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2020/01/the-major-purpose-that-episodic.html