Measuring intrusive prospective imagery using the impact of future events scale: psychometric properties and relation to risk for bipolar disorder

Deeprose, Catherine, Malik, Aiysha and Holmes, Emily A. (2011) Measuring intrusive prospective imagery using the impact of future events scale: psychometric properties and relation to risk for bipolar disorder. International Journal of Cognitive Therapy, 4 (2), 187-196. (doi:10.1521/ijct.2011.4.2.187).

Abstract

Intrusive prospective imagery is the experience of mental imagery of events that may happen in the future and which come to mind involuntarily (Deeprose & Holmes, 2010). This everyday phenomenon may be exacerbated in psychological disorders such as bipolar disorder (Holmes, Geddes, Colom, & Goodwin, 2008), although specific measures to assess this have been lacking. One such measure, the Impact of Future Events Scale (IFES; Deeprose & Holmes, 2010), is examined in the current article. In Study 1, adult volunteers (N = 50) completed the IFES on two occasions, with 1-week between measurements. This revealed acceptable test-rest reliability. In Study 2, (N = 90) IFES showed good internal consistency and confirmed two predictions. First, in the total sample, risk for bipolar disorder assessed by the Mood Disorder Questionnaire (MDQ; Hirschfeld et al., 2000) and IFES total score correlated positively. Second, when the sample was split into high (MDQ > 7) and low (MDQ < 6) bipolarity risk groups, higher IFES total scores were observed in the high risk group. We conclude that 1) IFES presents a useful measure for assessing intrusive prospective imagery with acceptable test-retest reliability and good internal consistency, and (2) risk for bipolar disorder is associated with elevated IFES total scores with potentially important clinical implications.

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Contributors

Author: Emily A. Holmes

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