Introduction
obesity, T2DM, NCC, HIT
EPSTEIN, EVENTS, OBESITY
Episodic future thinking (EFT), the vivid imagining of personal future events, has been shown to reliably reduce delay discounting, the devaluation of future rewards [Regardless of the translation setting or phase, studies examining EFT’s effects typically include a control condition for comparison. A common control condition in basic laboratory settings is episodic-recent thinking (ERT), the vivid remembering of recent personal events (i.e., within the past few days). While ERT is an appropriate control in the laboratory or naturalistic settings, repeated (i.e., daily or multiple times per day) engagement in ERT over weeks or months is impractical in clinical settings [To address these limitations, Rung and Epstein [Although Rung and Epstein [To further develop HIT as a clinical control for this population, the present study describes an online experiment in which participants with self-reported T2DM and obesity were recruited using Amazon Mechanical Turk and randomized to EFT, HIT, or a no-cue control (NCC) condition. EFT and HIT participants generated cues using a self-guided survey, while NCC participants did not generate cues. Afterward, participants completed a delay discounting task while instructed to vividly imagine or consider their EFT or HIT cues; NCC participants completed the delay discounting task without these instructions. We hypothesized that participants who were instructed to engage in EFT during the delay discounting task would have lower levels of delay discounting (i.e., more frequent selection of larger later rewards) compared to both HIT and NCC participants.