Arousal
When comparing affective arousal in all three conditions the results revealed a main effect of time, no main effect of condition, however an interaction effect. Thus, the results indicate that the participants change in arousal level are dependent on the condition. When comparing the conditions on the reported arousal post-manipulation with a simple main effect analysis (Sidak), no difference was found between the control and enhanced condition (When comparing the level of arousal in the spontaneous mental imagery condition (control) to the enhanced condition we found no main effect of time, no main effect of condition, and no interaction effect. The results indicate that there was no significant change in arousal in either the spontaneous mental imagery condition (control) or the enhanced condition. However, when comparing the spontaneous mental imagery condition (control) to the prevented condition we did find a main effect of time, and a main effect of condition, and an interaction effect. The results indicate that only the prevented mental imagery condition increased in level of arousal. Further supporting that only prevented condition changed the level of arousal, we found a main effect of time, no main effect of condition, but an interaction effect, when comparing the enhanced and prevented conditions. The results from the analyses show that only the prevented condition changed the affective arousal from pre-manipulation to post-manipulation, indicating that the mental rotation task, and not the mental imagery level led to the change in arousal level. In the pre-registration regarding hypothesis 4, we wrote that we did not specify a direction in affective arousal “direction not specified”. We did this because we were not sure if the task would be activating or de-activating. However, this was in some contradiction to hypothesis 3; since hypothesis 3 precedes hypothesis 4, we decided to remove this from the manuscript. This did not change the interpretation of the results since affective arousal did not seem to be changed by the level of mental imagery.