Scientists Build a New Scale to Measure Intrusive Glimpses of Feared Futures in Anxiety

Everyone knows what it feels like to picture a disaster before it happens: the mind suddenly conjures a vivid, sensory image of the presentation going wrong, the diagnosis arriving, the accident about to unfold. These involuntary, future-oriented mental simulations, which researchers call “flashforwards,” have long been implicated in theories of anxiety, yet they have remained strangely difficult to measure. Now a team at the University of Oxford has developed and validated a new psychological instrument designed specifically to capture them. The Oxford Flashforwards in Anxiety Scale, described in a study published in BMC Psychiatry, is a brief ten-item questionnaire that its creators say isolates the salience of intrusive future imagery without conflating it with the avoidance behaviors and hyperarousal symptoms that dominate most existing anxiety measures.

The research, led by Lydia Munns, Chloé Xin-Tong Lu and Alex Lau-Zhu of the Department of Experimental Psychology, set out to fill a gap that has frustrated cognitive theorists for years. Cognitive accounts of anxiety disorders hold that flashforwards are not just a curiosity of the anxious mind but a core maintaining mechanism: sensory-based, affect-laden mental simulations of future threats that arrive unbidden and are experienced as plausible or even impending. Unlike deliberate planning or worry expressed in words, these images carry the vividness of perception, recruiting similar neural and bodily responses as actual events, which may be precisely what makes them so distressing and so persistent.

Yet the field’s standard instruments have largely ignored this phenomenon. Existing imagery questionnaires tend to focus on the vividness or frequency of mental images in general, without targeting future-oriented intrusions, while established anxiety scales measure worry, avoidance and physiological arousal, leaving flashforwards either unmeasured or entangled with other symptoms. That measurement gap, the authors argue, has limited both theoretical insight into how intrusive future imagery drives anxiety and clinical progress in designing interventions that target it directly. To build their scale, the team grounded item development in theory and in previously published measures, and crucially involved stakeholders, gathering feedback from young people and clinicians to ensure the questions reflected real experiences.

The validation study recruited 538 young adults aged between 16 and 24, a window chosen deliberately because adolescence and young adulthood is the developmental period in which many anxiety disorders first emerge. Participants completed the new OFAS alongside the Generalised Anxiety Disorder-7, a widely used clinical screening tool, together with other key measures of related constructs. A subset of 306 participants returned for a follow-up assessment two weeks later, allowing the researchers to examine whether flashforward imagery measured at baseline predicted later anxiety. Smaller subgroups, including 124 participants with lagged data, supported additional longitudinal and network analyses.

The psychometric results were strikingly clean. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses converged on a single-factor solution: a compact ten-item scale in which all items tap one underlying construct, the overall salience of intrusive flashforward imagery. The one-factor model showed good fit to the data, and reliability was high, meaning the items consistently measured the same thing across respondents. The researchers also tested whether the scale behaved equivalently across age groups, and demonstrated measurement invariance when comparing participants aged 19 or younger with those over 19, an important property for any instrument intended to be used across adolescence and young adulthood without artifactual score differences.

Validity evidence came from several directions. Concurrent validity was supported by the expected associations between OFAS scores and existing anxiety measures. Incremental validity, the ability of the new scale to explain variance beyond what other instruments capture, was demonstrated, addressing the central criticism that previous measures confound future imagery with broader anxiety symptoms. Discriminant validity was likewise supported, indicating that the scale measures flashforward imagery as a distinguishable construct rather than simply re-labeling worry or fear. Together these analyses suggest the OFAS genuinely isolates the cognitive process it was designed to measure.

Perhaps the most compelling findings came from the prospective and network analyses. In the lagged analysis, flashforward imagery at baseline predicted anxiety levels two weeks later, even after statistically controlling for baseline anxiety and covariates. That pattern of prediction is what psychometricians call predictive validity, and it hints at something more provocative: intrusive images of feared futures may not merely accompany anxiety but anticipate its course. In a cross-sectional world of correlational data, a simple two-week lagged design cannot prove causation, but it moves the evidence a meaningful step beyond co-occurrence, consistent with cognitive models in which vivid threat simulations fuel and perpetuate anxious states.

Network analysis, an increasingly popular statistical approach that treats psychological symptoms as interconnected nodes in a system rather than as parts of a latent disorder, added another layer of nuance. In the anxiety network reconstructed from the data, flashforward imagery was not itself the most central node. That distinction belonged to worry, the repetitive verbal or conceptual rumination about future threat that has long dominated anxiety research. But flashforward imagery was closely connected to worry, sitting adjacent to the network’s most central symptom. The authors interpret this as further support for the scale’s construct validity, and it sketches an intriguing architecture of anxious cognition: word-based worry may occupy the hub, while image-based flashforwards form a tightly linked satellite, feeding into and drawing from the worry process.

The practical implications extend in several directions. Clinically, a brief, freely usable and psychometrically validated measure of flashforward salience gives researchers and practitioners a tool to identify individuals whose anxiety is driven disproportionately by intrusive future imagery, and to evaluate whether imagery-focused interventions, such as cognitive techniques that compete with or rescript threat images, change the outcomes that matter. The scale’s deliberate anchoring to mental imagery, without conflation with avoidance or hyperarousal, means treatment studies can now test whether targeting flashforwards specifically produces benefits that generic anxiety reduction does not. Developmentally, the demonstrated invariance across age groups makes the instrument suitable for studying the period when anxiety disorders typically take hold, potentially enabling earlier identification of young people at risk.

For a phenomenon that millions of people experience in the seconds before their stomach drops, flashforwards have been remarkably underserved by measurement science. This new scale does not resolve whether intrusive future imagery causes anxiety, but it provides the rigorous instrument that such questions require, and its predictive and network findings suggest the hypothesis is worth taking seriously. As the authors conclude, the validated tool promotes the study of flashforwards as a distinct cognitive process in anxiety and can provide a foundation to guide anxiety treatment innovation. If future research builds on this foundation, the fleeting, unwelcome pictures of catastrophe that flash through anxious minds may finally get the scientific attention their subjective impact has always demanded.

Subject of Research: Development and validation of a questionnaire measuring intrusive future-oriented mental imagery in anxiety

Article Title: Intrusive “flashforward” imagery and anxiety: development and validation of the Oxford Flashforwards in Anxiety Scale (OFAS)

Article References: Munns, L., Lu, C. X.-T., & Lau-Zhu, A. (2026). Intrusive “flashforward” imagery and anxiety: development and validation of the Oxford Flashforwards in Anxiety Scale (OFAS). BMC Psychiatry. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12888-026-08680-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12888-026-08680-z

Keywords: anxiety, mental imagery, flashforwards, psychometrics, scale validation, worry, adolescence, young adults, cognitive psychology, BMC Psychiatry, network analysis, predictive validity