What’s in a cue?: Using natural language processing to quantify content characteristics of episodic future thinking in the context of overweight and obesity

Episodic future thinking (EFT), an intervention in which participants vividly imagine their future, has been explored as a cognitive intervention to reduce delay discounting and decrease engagement in harmful health behaviors. In these studies, participants generate text descriptions of personally meaningful future events. The content of these text descriptions, or cues, is heterogeneous and can vary along several dimensions (e.g. references to health, celebrations, family; vividness; emotional valence). However, little work has quantified this heterogeneity or potential importance for EFT's efficacy. To better understand the potential impact of EFT content in the context of health behavior change (e.g. diet) among people with or at risk for obesity and related conditions, we used data from 19 prior EFT studies, including 1705 participants (mean body mass index = 33.1) who generated 9714 cues. We used natural language processing to classify EFT content and examined whether EFT content moderated effects on delay discounting. Cues most commonly involved recreation, food, and spending time with family, and least commonly involved references to health and self-improvement. Cues were generally classified as highly vivid, episodic, and positively valent (consistent with the intervention's design). In multivariate regression with model selection, EFT content did not significantly moderate the effect of the episodic thinking intervention. Thus, we find no evidence that any of the content characteristics we examined were important moderators of the efficacy of EFT in reducing delay discounting. This suggests that EFT's efficacy is robust against variability in these characteristics. However, note that in all studies, EFT methods were designed to generate high levels of vividness, episodicity, and emotional valence, potentially resulting in a ceiling effect in these content areas. Moreover, EFT content was not experimentally manipulated, limiting causal inference. Future studies should experimentally examine these and other content characteristics and evaluate their possible role in EFT's efficacy.