Imagining Infidelity: Gender Differences in Episodic Future Thinking

Current research concentrated on gender differences in terms of the episodic future thinking by including infidelity which is a stressful experience, as a manipulator. In detail, current study focused on the question of how episodic future thinking of people would be affected when they were asked to imagine being cheated, and whether this effect would differ in terms of gender. Two facets of the episodic future thinking were analysed in detail; centrality of the event and phenomenological characteristics. There was insignificant difference in terms of infidelity between the ratings of male and female participants and no significant difference in answers to both sexual and emotional infidelity in CES results. This was also revealed that it was insignificant interaction between gender and two form of infidelity. We expected that women’s score would be higher than men for both types of infidelities, but only for visual imagery, spatial imagery, and perspective significant differences were found among two groups. Moreover, results did not demonstrate a significant difference between sexual infidelity and emotional infidelity in terms of AMQ, plus insignificant interaction effect was found for gender and infidelity types on AMQ. In conclusion, current study revealed insignificant difference between men and women in terms of episodic future thinking. Keywords: Infidelity, CES, AMQ, Gender, Episodic Future Thinking