Emotion Experience in Aphantasia: Insights from Autobiographical Memory, Prospection and Mental Simulation

Abstract

Mental imagery functions as an emotional amplifier by supporting perceptually vivid simulations in memory and prospection. Aphantasia, characterized by absent or severely reduced visual imagery, has relevantly been associated with attenuated emotional experience during autobiographical recall, future thinking, and engagement with narrated events. However, the neural mechanisms underlying these affective differences and how they relate to broader theories of episodic construction remain underexplored. This review synthesizes evidence demonstrating an attenuation of embodied emotion in aphantasia alongside preserved emotional appraisal. It also examines the phenomenological differences in remembering and imagining episodic events. Situating these findings within theories of episodic reconstruction, this review explores possible implications of imagery absence in aphantasia for empathy, evaluative conditioning, motivation, adaptive decision-making and emotion regulation. A key direction for future theorizing is to account for the embodied and appraisal components of emotional experience in aphantasia and their significance across prospective and retrospective autobiographical events at both behavioral and neural levels.