The experience of mental imagery is a common part of everyday life for most people, and much of this mental imagery has an emotional tone. For example, we may enjoy anticipating an upcoming holiday in our imagination, or an unpleasant image we saw on the television the previous evening may suddenly flash into our mind and bring with it a feeling of sadness or disgust. Scientific research into mental imagery has demonstrated its capacity to evoke emotion, and this is likely to play a role in the important functions that mental imagery appears to have in everyday life. However, the experience of emotional mental imagery is not always helpful, and dysfunctions in emotional mental imagery are observed across a range of areas of mental health, such as depression and anxiety disorders. At the same time, the properties of emotional mental imagery can be deliberately harnessed, for example in psychological therapies. The research presented in this chapter highlights the importance of being aware of the capacity of mental imagery to evoke emotion and the properties of emotional mental imagery when studying the imagination, and raises a number of suggestions for furthering interdisciplinary research in this area.

Research concerning the relation between memory and imagination has focused increasingly on how memory contributes to imagining or simulating future and other hypothetical events. According to the constructive episodic simulation hypothesis (Schacter and Addis, 2007a, 2007b), episodic memory plays an important role in supporting the construction of imagined future events by allowing the retrieval and flexible recombination of elements of past experiences into simulations of possible future scenarios. Further, the hypothesis holds that the same flexible recombination processes that are useful for simulating possible future experiences can produce memory errors that result from miscombining elements of past experiences. A growing number of experimental studies during the past decade have examined various aspects of this hypothesis. Here, we consider (1) cognitive studies that have tested key elements of the constructive episodic simulation hypothesis; (2) neuroimaging studies that have elucidated the neural underpinnings of the constructive episodic simulation hypothesis; (3) recent experimental evidence linking flexible recombination and episodic simulation processes with memory errors; and (4) ways in which the conceptual focus of constructive episodic simulation hypothesis has changed over the past decade.