Table Of ContentProspection, well- being,
and mental health
Prospection,
well- being, and
mental health
Andrew MacLeod
Royal Holloway University of London
1
1
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Mick Power, Jo Dickson, Barney Dunn, Michael Evangeli,
Richard Moore, Dan Schacter, Fiona Tasker and Mark Williams for reading
chapters and providing insightful comments. I am especially grateful to Mark,
who read the whole manuscript and provided invaluable, wise advice. On a
visit to Philadelphia in 2012, Marty Seligman helpfully suggested to me the
idea of writing this book, which was the prompt I needed to make it happen.
Everyone at Oxford University Press, notably, Martin Baum, Charlotte Green,
and Matthias Butler, has been supportive and enabled me to write the book I
wanted to. Robert Kelsey kindly provided one of his wonderful paintings for the
cover and I hope others will enjoy it as much as I do. Finally, I want to express
my appreciation to Fiona, Euan, and Rhiannon for their encouragement, sup-
port, and many useful discussions while writing this book, and, more than any-
thing, for their presence.
Contents
1 Thinking about the future 1
2 Expectancies 14
3 Optimism and pessimism 48
4 Predicting feelings 78
5 Anticipatory feelings 99
6 Memory 118
7 Goals 149
8 Plans 182
9 Temporal orientation and mindfulness 204
10 Intervention 234
11 Prospection, well- being, and mental health 255
Name Index 275
Subject Index 281
Chapter 1
Thinking about the future
Introduction
This book is about how we think about the future. It is about how we think about
our own personal futures and how such prospection is connected to our well-
being and mental health. My own past has, in fact, been filled with studying the
future. I first started investigating future- directed thinking and well- being over
30 years ago, when after a term of studying mood and memory, my PhD evolved
into examining how chronically anxious worriers judge the likelihood of future
negative events happening to them. I have been engaged ever since in trying to
understand future- directed thinking and its relation to well-b eing and mental
health, moving on from studying anxious worry about the future to trying to
understand more about suicidal hopelessness for the future and, more recently,
how positive aspects of well- being link to prospection. Much of the research
that I have conducted over that period appears at various places throughout
this book.
Prospection is one of those activities that we are engaged in much of the time
without necessarily being consciously aware of doing so. We do become con-
scious of it, however, when it goes wrong, in the same sort of way that we might
only start to become more aware of our breathing when we are breathless. One
strand that will run throughout this book is that there are two distinct ways that
prospection goes wrong for our emotional well- being. The first is where our
minds are unreasonably preoccupied with aversive things that might happen to
us in the future, or, as Mark Twain is reported to have said, ‘my life has been full
of misfortunes, most of which have never happened’. The second problematic
way of thinking is where we lack positive thoughts about the future. This is a
subtler kind of difficulty and harder to detect, because absence is just usually less
obvious than presence. In the Arthur Conan Doyle story, Silver Blaze, the mys-
tery was only solved when Sherlock Holmes realized that the dog, which should
have barked in the night if a stranger had approached it, had not, and therefore
the culprit could only have been someone familiar to the dog. It required the
genius of Sherlock Holmes to spot that something that should have been there
was missing. The absence of positive thoughts and feelings about the future,
