Martijn van Teffelen

Chapter 5 112 others) assigned intentionality (Alicke, 2000). For this reason, blame-related cognitions (e.g., “he is responsible for hurting my feelings”) may flag the ‘hotspot’ at which intentionality was attributed. On top of that, evidence indicates that these so-called memory ‘hotspots’ are related to high, or even ‘peak’ levels of affect (Holmes et al., 2005). It may therefore also be of value to use emotion ratings (e.g., a subjective units of distress scale) in the imagery recovering process. For example, at the start, and before and after asking participants what they feel during the imagery interview. However, asking for emotion ratings already may counteract the evoked emotional arousal. Even though a significant number of potential problems can be tackled, the intervention was not successful for all participants. First, some participants were, for instance, not able to generate a mental image, because they felt they did not have the general capacity to do so. Such participants kept on describing a realistic account of what happened and said that ‘they could not come up with it’. Second, for some participants it was difficult to identify a belief that was challengeable, because the core of the harmful belief was not so much about intentionality, but more about tolerance, fairness, or blame. For example, a man described that he got angry because the management board at his job let him wait outside a meeting room for three minutes. The best hostile belief he provided was ‘they do not keep their appointment’. In this particular case it helped to ask, ‘does it help you to think that way?’. Third, as is shown in Table 3, we believe that evidence-gathering on its own is not able to cast enough doubt on the intentionality of ‘the aggressor’ and that it is the helpful image that in the end provokes a feeling of sympathy or pity with the aggressor. FUTURE DIRECTIONS Until now, only our own study showed that compared to active control and traditional CR, one session of I-CR is more efficacious and sustainable over time in reducing hostile beliefs and aggressive inclinations (Van Teffelen et al., under revision). However, these findings were obtained in mostly females (72%) with increased, but non-clinical levels of hostility. At this point it is unclear if the intervention also works in clinical samples, or samples that include more men. It is also unclear whether I-CR effects are mediated by (other) personal characteristics as, for example, a person’s creativity or imagery ability. Although we ran into some participants that seemed to have difficulties with generating mental images, scientific evidence that supports a positive relationship between general imagery capacity and the efficacy of imagery procedures is mixed (see Dibbets et al. (2012) versus Lee and Kwon (2013)). In addition, several empirical questions currently remain to be investigated. For example, it is unclear what the impact would be of multiple sessions, what would be the optimal number of sessions, if these sessions generalize to novel ‘real-life’ situations, or if the effect sustains