Will future thinking change following treatment?
While future thinking has been studied in several clinical groups (MacLeod, 1999). I found
only one study on changes in future thinking following treatment. MacLeod, Tata et al.
(MacLeod et al., 1998) administered the FTT before and after treatment to a group of
parasuicidal patients. The results indicated an improvement in positive future thinking
following manual-assisted CBT.
Although there is a lack of pre-post treatment studies on future thinking in depressed people,
one experimental study found that rumination lead to increased negative future thinking
(Lavender & Watkins, 2004), and in another study a positive mood induction lead to
decreased negative future anticipations (de Jong-Meyer, Kuczmera, & Tripp, 2007). Since
both ruminative think and mood may be influenced by treatment it is likely that scores on the
FTT change following treatment