Adversity, time, and well-being: A longitudinal analysis of time perspective in adulthood.

Abstract

Despite the prominence of time in influential aging theories and the ubiquity of stress across the lifespan, research addressing how time perspective (TP) and adversity are associated with wellbeing across adulthood is rare. Examining the role of TP in coping with life events over the lifespan would be best accomplished after large-scale population-based exposure to a specific event, with repeated assessments to examine within-and between-person differences over time.A national sample aged 18-91 years (N = 722, M = 49.4 years) was followed for three years after the September 11, 2001 (9/11) terrorist attacks. Respondents completed assessments of 9/11-related television exposure 9-21 days after the attacks, temporal disintegration 2 months post-9/11, and TP, ongoing stress, and well-being at 12, 24, and 36 months post-9/11. Results provided support for measurement invariance of TP across time and across age. Early 9/11-related television exposure was significantly associated with greater temporal disintegration.Temporal disintegration and ongoing stress, in turn, were associated with between-and withinperson variation in past TP. This effect was qualified by an age interaction that indicated a stronger relationship between ongoing stress and past TP for younger compared with older adults. Past and future TP were significantly and independently related to individual differences and within-person variation in psychological well-being, regardless of age. Future work should incorporate adversity as an important correlate of TP across adulthood. The window of time allows us to see our life stories unfold, build our identity, identify future ambitions, and feel proud of our successes. Our sense of time connects who we have been with who we are and who we aspire to be. Indeed, scholars have argued that our experience of time provides a foundation for the emergence of conscious thought and behavior (James, 1890;Kelly, 1955;Lewin, 1942); without time our lives would consist of isolated, incoherent moments lacking the essential consciousness that makes us human. By assigning life experiences to time frames of past, present, and future, we gain a broader perspective that helps us make sense of our lives (see Zimbardo & Boyd, 2008).

Depressive symptoms and time perspective in older adults: associations beyond personality and negative life events

“…Interestingly, negative life events were associated with both Past Negative and Future Negative in the correlational analysis (see Table 2). This finding possibly reflects that even though an individual's time perspective is considered as fairly stable and traitlike , it may at least to some extent, be modulated by environmental influences, such as negative (Holman, Silver, Mogle, & Scott, 2016) or positive (Leist, Ferring, & Filipp, 2010) life events.…”

“…In accord with the theoretical framework behind the ZTPI, we assumed that certain time perspective biases predispose of depressive symptoms, but a reversed direction of influence, from depressive mood state to temporal perspective, might exist (cf. Holman et al, 2016); a model involving a bidirectional influence might possibly be the most accurate. Disentangling the influences requires longitudinal data with repeated measurement of both constructs.…”

Getting “Stuck” in the Future or the Past: Relationships between Dimensions of Time Perspective, Executive Functions, and Repetitive Negative Thinking in Anxiety

“…Research has for instance shown that individual differences in time perspective can predict reactions to traumatic events [9], and that time perspective, and particularly Past Negative, is associated with depression and neuroticism [10]. Recent time perspective research has also underlined the importance of Future Negative, which has been associated with maladaptive coping strategies in late adolescence [11] and negatively associated with well-being among older adults [12].…”

Relationship between time perspective and job satisfaction

“…It can be defined as a set of mainly non-conscious cognitive processes in which continuous flows of experiences are assigned to time frames that help give meaning to those experiences (Keough et al, 1999). It is conceptualised both as a stable personality construct and as subject to change following adversity (Holman et al, 2016;Zimbardo and Boyd, 1999) and different interventions (Boniwell et al, 2014;Korff et al, 2017;Seijts, 1998).…”