Affective forecasting or prospection is the ability to construct future events mentally and allows us to envision what will be happening or to “pre-experience” the event long before it happens. It is the unique ability of human being and is closely related to our optimal everyday life activities. Impaired ability to envision future plays an important role in the psychological mechanisms of reduced ability to experience pleasure and reduced motivation to pay effort to obtain reward, i.e., a phenomenon of anhedonia and amotivation that commonly observed in patients with mental disorders including schizophrenia, autism and major depressive disorder. Empirical findings suggest that individuals with subclinical psychopathology such as high levels of social anhedonia would generate less specific events, report less positive emotion and less vivid mental representation than individuals with low level of such traits.

Recently, Dr. Raymond Chan and his team from the Neuropsychology and Applied Cognitive Neuroscience (NACN) Laboratory, CAS Key Laboratory of Mental Health, Institute of Psychology have also demonstrated that individuals with high level of social anhedonia do exhibit altered activation and cortico-striatal functional connectivity when they are envisioning positive future events comparing to individuals with low level of social anhedonia. However, it is still unclear whether individuals with other subclinical psychopathology would exhibit altered neural mechanisms of envisioning the future.

In order to address such an issue, Dr. Raymond Chan and his team from the Neuropsychology and Applied Cognitive Neuroscience (NACN) Laboratory, CAS Key Laboratory of Mental Health, Institute of Psychology have conducted a study to investigate the neural correlates for envisioning future events and to examine whether individuals with schizotypal traits, autistic traits and subsyndromal depressive symptoms would exhibit shared or distinct neural correlates of prospection. They recruited 34 individuals with autistic traits, 27 individuals with schizotypal traits, 31 individuals with depressive symptoms, and 35 controls. All participants completed a prospection task while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging.

The research findings showed that individuals with autistic traits and individuals with schizotypal traits exhibited an intact behavioural performance on envisioning future events. However, they did exhibit subtle neural alterations during envisioning future events comparing to individuals with low levels of specific traits. Such altered neural responses in the anterior cingulate cortex and frontal gyrus in individuals with autistic traits might indicate that a subtle neural changes for anticipating positive and neutral future events, whilst the altered neural responses in caudate in individuals with schizotypal traits might indicate a “compensated” neural changes for imagining positive emotions during prospection.

Taken together, these findings suggest individuals with different subclinical psychopathologies would exhibit unique alteration of neural response patterns in the process of prospection. These findings are particularly important to guide us to formulate specific non-medical intervention for prospection in clinical cases of schizophrenia, autism and major depressive disorder.

The study was supported by the National Key Research and Development Programme, the National Natural Science Foundation China, the Beijing Municipal Science & Technology Commission Grant, the Beijing Training Project for the Leading Talents in Science and Technology, and the CAS Key Laboratory of Mental Health, Institute of Psychology.

This study is now published online in Journal of Abnormal Psychology on November 2021.

-        Zhang, R. T., Yang, Z. Y., Huang, J., Wang, Y. M., Zhou, H. Y., Wang, Y., Lui, S. S. Y., Cheung, E. F. C., Chan, R. C. K.* (2021). Neural mechanisms of prospection in individuals with schizotypal traits, autistic traits or depressive symptoms. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 130(8), 807–814.

Related publication
-        Zhang, R. T., Yang, Z. Y., Wang, Y. M., Wang, Y., Yang, T. X., Cheung, E. F. C., Martin E. A., Chan, R. C. K. * (2020). Affective forecasting in individuals with social anhedonia: The role of social components in anticipated emotion, prospection and neural activation. Schizophrenia Research, 215, 322-329
-        Yang, Z. Y., Zhang, R. T., Wang, Y. M., Huang, J., Zhou, H. Y., Cheung, E. F. C., Chan, R. C. K. * (2021). Altered activation and functional connectivity in individuals with social anhedonia when envisioning positive future episodes. Psychological Medicine, doi.org/10.1017/S0033291721000970

Institute of Psychology
Chinese Academy of Sciences
Beijing 100101, China.
E-mail: liuc@psych.ac.cn