Development Of An Electronic Future-Thinking Task: A Pilot Study

In this study, an electronic version of the future-thinking task was created in order to make the task less time consuming to administer and score. The electronic version of the future-thinking task was constructed by aggregating domains for future events based on the future-thinking and worry literature. We hypothesized that we would replicate the original future-thinking task’s previous relational findings with anxiety and depression; specifically undergraduate students (n =19) were recruited to test the effectiveness of this new future-thinking task in relation to the original task and measures of anxiety and depression. The measures used were the CES-D for depression, ASI-3 for anxiety sensitivity, and positive and negative mood scales. The results partially replicated previous findings with the original task. The electronic positive future-thinking task significantly predicted CES-D scores and the electronic negative future-thinking task significantly predicted ASI-3 scores. However, the researchers did not replicate the findings for the original task. The original positive future-thinking task did not predict CES-D scores and the original negative future-thinking task did not predict ASI-3 scores. Findings for future development and research for this task are discussed.