تاثیر خود کارآمدی ادراک شده بر روی سفر ذهنی در زمان و حل مسئله اجتماعی

Current models of autobiographical memory suggest that self-identity guides autobiographical memory retrieval. Further, the capacity to recall the past and imagine one’s self in the future (mental time travel) can influence social problem solving. We examined whether manipulating self-identity, through an induction task in which students were led to believe they possessed high or low self-efficacy, impacted episodic specificity and content of retrieved and imagined events, as well as social problem solving. Compared to individuals in the low self efficacy group, individuals in the high self efficacy group generated past and future events with greater (a) specificity, (b) positive words, and (c) self-efficacious statements, and also performed better on social problem solving indices. A lack of episodic detail for future events predicted poorer performance on social problem solving tasks. Strategies that increase perceived self-efficacy may help individuals to selectively construct a past and future that aids in negotiating social problems.

Mental time travel (MTT), the cognitive capacity to subjectively recall and re-experience episodes from our past or ‘pre-experience’ our lives in the future through imagination and simulation, is a pervasive part of everyday life. Although debate surrounds whether or not this mental capacity is uniquely human (Suddendorf & Corballis, 2007), converging evidence from neuropsychological, clinical, developmental, and neuroimaging studies indicates that the processes and neuroanatomical structures underlying the reconstruction of autobiographical memories and the projection and simulation of personal future events are closely linked (for a review see Schacter et al., 2008 and Szpunar, 2010). For example, brain imaging studies demonstrate extensive overlap in neural activation when individuals are asked to recall autobiographical memories and imagine personal future events (e.g. Addis, Wong, & Schacter, 2007). Moreover, autobiographical memories and imagined future events respond similarly to experimental manipulations (Berntsen and Jacobsen, 2008 and D’Argembeau and Van Der Linden, 2004) and individuals with clinical disorders tend to exhibit similar deficits and biases when asked to generate past and future events (e.g. D’Argembeau et al., 2008, Moore and Zoellner, 2007 and Williams et al., 1996).