title: Prescribed journeys through life: Cultural differences in mental time travel between Middle Easterners and Scandinavians.
abstract: Mental time travel is the ability to remember past events and imagine future events. Here, 124 Middle Easterners and 128 Scandinavians generated important past and future events. These different societies present a unique opportunity to examine effects of culture. Findings indicate stronger influence of normative schemas and greater use of mental time travel to teach, inform and direct behaviour in the Middle East compared with Scandinavia. The Middle Easterners generated more events that corresponded to their cultural life script and that contained religious words, whereas the Scandinavians reported events with a more positive mood impact. Effects of gender were mainly found in the Middle East. Main effects of time orientation largely replicated recent findings showing that simulation of future and past events are not necessarily parallel processes. In accordance with the notion that future simulations rely on schema-based construction, important future events showed a higher overlap with life script events than past events in both cultures. In general, cross-cultural discrepancies were larger in future compared with past events. Notably, the high focus in the Middle East on sharing future events to give cultural guidance is consistent with the increased adherence to normative scripts found in this culture.
authors.affiliation: Center on Autobiographical Memory Research - CON AMORE, Department of Psychology and Behavioural Sciences, Aarhus University, Bartholins Allé 9, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark. Electronic address: cott@psy.au.dk.
authors.forename: Christina Lundsgaard
authors.initials: CL
authors.lastname: Ottsen
authors.affiliation: Center on Autobiographical Memory Research - CON AMORE, Department of Psychology and Behavioural Sciences, Aarhus University, Bartholins Allé 9, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark. Electronic address: dorthe@psy.au.dk.
authors.forename: Dorthe
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Berntsen
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D003431:Cross-Cultural Comparison; D005260:Female; D005544:Forecasting; D006801:Humans; D007092:Imagination; D008297:Male; D061212:Memory, Episodic; D011939:Mental Recall; D008875:Middle Aged; D008877:Middle East / Q000208:ethnology; D012537:Scandinavian and Nordic Countries / Q000208:ethnology; D012737:Sex Factors; D013997:Time Factors; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Autobiographical memory; Cultural life script; Episodic future simulation; Functions; Gender; Religion; Schema