Special issue introduction Mental time travel: A conceptual overview of social psychological perspectives on a fundamental human capacity KAI EPSTUDE 1 * AND JOHANNA PEETZ 2 * 1 Department of Psychology, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands; 2 Psychology Department, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada Abstract Humans have the unique capacity to mentally travel through time, that is, to reﬂect on the past, anticipate the future, and con- struct alternate realities in their minds. The ability to mentally travel through time affects a variety of social psychological topics. Representations of events can differ considerably, depending on the event’s temporal location and distance from the present. Current emotions may be inﬂuenced by thoughts of future and past times (e.g., nostalgia, hope). Judgments about future events and actions are an important aspect of everyday functioning (e.g., predictions). Indeed, hypothetical thought about counterfac- tual events that might never come to pass may change the perception and evaluation of present reality. Despite this varied and extensive inﬂuence of time on affect, judgment, perception, and behavior, these diverse topics have not been brought together under one common roof. In this overview article and in the special issue on Mental Time Travel, we aim to identify key themes of mental time travel research, point to communalities and differences, and help to integrate various aspects of mental time travel research. Future directions regarding open questions, need for theoretical integration, and further empirical research are discussed. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. The present is “no knife-edge, but a saddle-back, with a certain breadth of its own on which we sit perched, and from which we look in two directions into time.” (James, 1890/1950, p. 605) People are rarely present in the present (Killingsworth & Gilbert, 2010; Klinger & Cox, 1987). Instead, a signiﬁcant portion of people spend their time thinking about anything but what they are presently doing (Berntsen & Jacobsen, 2008; Killingsworth & Gilbert, 2010). A good deal of this time people reﬂect on the past, anticipate the future, or construct hy- pothetical realities. This ability to project the self both back- ward and forward in time is uniquely human (Suddendorf & Corballis, 1997) and a critical as well as a ubiquitous aspect of human cognition. Without such mental time travel, a person could not experience emotions such as regret, hope, or nostalgia—a person could not understand the self. Indeed, a sense of self is constituted through reﬂection on historical events (e.g., Wohl & Branscombe, 2008), focus on what they were like in the past (e.g., Wilson & Ross, 2001) and what their potential future might look like (e.g., Oyserman, Bybee, & Terry, 2006). Mental time travel might extend as far as reﬂecting on historical events (Wohl & Branscombe, 2008), mentally traveling to an earlier point in one’s own life (Epstude & Roese, 2008; Sedikides, Wildschut, Arndt, & Routledge, 2008) or a focus on temporally recent points in time such as minutes before the present (Van Boven, White, & Huber, 2009). Given the importance of mental time travel for the self, it is not surprising that it has long received considerable attention from cognitive psychologists (for a review, see Suddendorf & Corballis, 2007). Social psychologists, however, have been remarkably quiet about time as a psychological variable and mental time travel as a psychological concept. Indeed, social psychology has traditionally perceived the inﬂuence of history as noise in their experiments that should be endeavored to be controlled (for arguments contradicting this view, see Wohl & Jetten, 2011). Time, however, is undergoing a change in social psychologists’ understanding about the impact it has on psychological processes. In the last 10 years, papers using the keyword “time” or “temporal” in the document title have doubled from 2001 (1143 articles or 1.9% of all available PsycINFO articles) to 2011 (2408 articles or 1.6% of all available PsycINFO articles), and 18.3% of articles available on PsycINFO today make a reference to “time” anywhere in their record. A striking result of this recent and widespread interest in time and mental time travel in social psychology is the number of *Correspondence to: Kai Epstude, Department of Psychology, University of Groningen, 9712 TS Groningen, The Netherlands. E-mail: k.epstude@rug.nl Johanna Peetz, Carleton University, Psychology Department, 1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, ON K1S 5B6, Canada. E-mail: johanna_peetz@carleton.ca European Journal of Social Psychology, Eur. J. Soc. Psychol. 42, 269–275 (2012) Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/ejsp.1867 Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.