Seeing is believing: mental imagery amplifies moral, emotional, and motivational responding to mentally constructed hypothetical events

Mental imagery is theorised to support important mental simulation processes, yet there remains little direct evidence of its functional impact on moral, emotional, and motivational processes. This pre-registered study examined whether the ability to generate visual mental imagery amplifies magical thinking responses to mentally constructed emotional events. Using a modified laboratory harm provocation paradigm, participants with aphantasia (minimal or absent visual imagery; N = 32) and visualisers (normal to high imagery ability; N = 48) were asked to write and elaborate on the sentence “I hope [name of a loved one] is in a car accident”, followed by an episodic elaboration phase to ensure both groups engaged in concrete-experiential mental processing of the specific event. The Visualiser group reported significantly higher anxiety, guilt, moral violation, responsibility, and urge to neutralise the thought relative to Aphantasic participants, despite similar perceptions of event likelihood and severity, and after accounting for the effects of age and trait magical thinking. However, neutralisation behaviour did not differ between groups. Mental imagery ratings and episodic detail reports confirmed that visualisers generated richer sensory representations of the imagined event. These findings support emulation theory by demonstrating that scene-based mental imagery amplifies emotional and motivational responses to hypothetical events, contributing to the phenomenological intensity of intrusive thoughts. The results have implications for understanding the cognitive mechanisms underlying magical thinking and compulsive behaviours. Results suggest that aphantasia may confer reduced vulnerability to such responses.