Mental Contrasting Modulates Automatic Attitudes Towards Obstacles of Reality

Abstract

Mental Contrasting of a desired future with obstacles of reality is a self-regulation strategy that produces expectancy-based levels of energization, which in turn predicts goal pursuit. The higher the expectations of success, the more energized people feel and the more they engage in goal pursuit. The present research investigates automatic attitudes towards obstacles of reality as a potential mechanism of this effect. As people who actively pursue a goal display a negative automatic attitude towards objects that impede goal attainment (i.e., obstacles), we predict and find that participants who use mental contrasting (compared to control conditions) display a more negative automatic attitude towards their obstacles of reality the higher their expectations of success are. In three studies, automatic attitudes towards obstacles of reality have been measured via various implicit paradigms (i.e., a masked and an unmasked affective priming task, or an extrinsic affective Simon task), and within various domains (relationships, achievement, and health). Importantly, in Study 3, automatic attitudes towards obstacles of reality mediated mental contrasting effects on feelings of energization. This then translated into goal pursuit (i.e., self-reported commitment to eat more healthily and other-rated healthy eating measured via an online daily nutrition diary over two weeks). Results imply that mental contrasting by promoting negative automatic attitudes towards obstacles of reality in line with expectations of success may instigate feelings of energization, which then help to overcome such realities (e.g., to eat a hamburger) towards the attainment of one’s desired future (e.g., improve eating habits).