Research library
Papers about aphantasia and mental imagery, with summaries in plain words. The summaries are generated by AI and may contain errors.
Lam and colleagues · Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry
In 72 Hong Kong adults with high social anxiety, five days of online training in reading ambiguous social situations as harmless rather than threatening reduced negative interpretations more than a neutral reading task. People who rated their imagery as more vivid, especially for imagined feelings, body sensations, touch and smell, gained the most, while visual imagery made no clear difference. The training did not lower social anxiety more than the control task, though in the training group, people with more vivid imagery overall reported larger drops in anxiety about social interaction.
Grunert and colleagues · Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry
Adding imagery rescripting helped 79% of PTSD patients who failed to improve with standard exposure. This suggests that active manipulation of mental imagery is necessary to resolve trauma-related emotions like anger and guilt.
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Arntz, Tiesema and Kindt · Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry
Adding imagery rescripting to imaginal exposure significantly improved anger control and reduced guilt in PTSD patients compared to exposure alone. This suggests that active modification of mental imagery is more effective than simple exposure for treating trauma-related emotions.