Translating episodic future thinking manipulations for clinical use: Development of a clinical control

Many studies support that Episodic Future Thinking (EFT) reduces maladaptive health behaviors and how much individuals devalue the future (steepness of delay discounting). In order to understand the clinical utility of EFT, a control procedure that equates groups in non-specific treatment factors (e.g., expectancy of change, perceived connection of content to health behavior) is needed. The present research evaluated the effects of EFT relative to a novel control (health information thinking; HIT), which was designed to be structurally similar to EFT while incorporating elements from existing clinical controls. In a sample of Amazon Mechanical Turk workers (N = 254), we found that EFT reduced discounting relative to the HIT procedure and a standard EFT control. There were some affective differences across groups and differences in adherence to the intervention content, but these were unrelated to discounting. Delay discounting was not equivalent across the control groups, but this may not be a necessary condition to fulfill for a clinical control. Future research will need to identify whether the HIT procedure serves as a good control for other dependent variables when studying EFT and develop controls analogous to usual care or a “wait-list” in clinical contexts.