Fig. 1.

Illustration of the Imagine/No-Imagine procedure. (Upper) Participants provided episodes that they had already previously feared might happen to them. (The pictures illustrate some of these provided episodes.) For each episode, they also gave a reminder word as a strong cue for the respective fear and a key detail word that denotes a detail typical of their imagination of the respective fear. (This detail was used as a dependent measure as described below.) (Middle) In the Imagine/No-Imagine phase, participants repeatedly imagined events cued with green reminder words while trying to suppress all thoughts and images from coming to mind of episodes cued with red reminders. (Lower) Finally, we tested participants’ ability to recall typical details of their imagination in the form of the key detail words, asked them to freely imagine each episode out loud, and assessed their apprehensiveness toward the events.