Introduction
EVENTS
Every day we face different risks, everything from driving in traffic to societal issues like climate change. But what determines how we act in the face of these risks? Why do we sometimes take a leap of fate (i.e., risk seeking), and other times take the safe route (i.e., risk aversive)? The last couple of decades has shed light on the enormous importance of affect in how we perceive riskClimate change is an ongoing crisis that poses several risks for individuals and society. Risky environmental events are already at a high level and are only predicted to increase over the coming decadesThroughout the affect-as-information and risk-as-feelings literature, imagery (both pictorial and mental) has often been stipulated to be important for activating risk-associated affectsAlthough mental imagery has been suggested to impact our affects and subsequent risk perception, few studies have attempted to show a causal relationship between imagery, affect, and risk perceptionBeyond extending the understanding of the causal relationship between mental imagery, affective experience, and risk to a new context (i.e., climate change), our methodology differs from previous research concerning both experimental manipulation and control conditions. The current study manipulates mental imagery into three levels (1) by not specifying how to process the presented environmental events (i.e., spontaneous imagery), or (2) prompting participants to create vivid mental images of the events (i.e., enhanced mental imagery), or (3) preventing vivid mental images through a visuospatial interference task (i.e., prevented mental imagery).In our enhanced mental imagery condition, we aim for a methodology that creates vivid multimodal mental images. Previous studies have used free or semantic associationsIn the current study, we instead use a prevented mental imagery condition, utilizing visuospatial interference, which benefits from the limited resources of working memory