Studying how perception about time changes with age has a long history in life span developmental psychological research. There currently appears to be a general consensus that future time is perceived as more limited with age and that older people are more present-focused and less future-focused than younger people.
However, there are debates about whether these age differences are positively related to well-being and to what extent there are boundary conditions beyond which these age differences would cease to occur.
The eight manuscripts included in the September 2016 special issue "The Role of Time and Time Perspective in Age-Related Processes" published in Psychology and Aging, attempt to shed light on these debates. In doing so, many manuscripts in the special issue refine the dominant theoretical perspective on the topic — socioemotional selectivity theory — and introduce new theoretical perspectives.
Socioemotional selectivity theory (Carstensen, 2006) argues that the subjective sense of how much time is left in one's life determines the priority of goals. Older adults focus more on emotionally meaningful goals because they have a more limited future time perspective than do younger adults.
Strough et al. both support and challenge this theory. The researchers found that older age was associated with avoiding preoccupation with negative events and a greater focus on limited time. Yet, the age differences in avoiding preoccupation with negative events were not accounted for by the focus on limited time.
Similarly, Bohn, Kwong See, and Fung compared younger adults, young-olds, old-olds and persons with Alzheimer's disease who were similar in age with old-olds on their future time perspective and memory for positive, negative, and neutral images. They found that, despite the fact that persons with Alzheimer's disease had a future time perspective similar to that of young-olds, these persons showed the positivity effect in memory (that is, remembering more positive images relative to negative images) similar to old-olds.
Next, Grühn, Sharifian, and Chu used an integrative data-analytic approach to combine the samples of nine studies in which future time perspective was assessed. They found that although older adults had a more limited future time perspective than younger adults, age and limited future time perspective had opposite effects in predicting subjective well-being, affect, positive emotions, empathy, and attitudes toward emotions.
How can we reconcile the fact that older adults indeed have a more limited future time perspective than do younger adults, but future time perspective may not always account for age differences in emotional processing and functioning? One potential explanation is the existence of moderators.
Segerstrom et al. experimentally tested the effects of time perspective and self-regulatory fatigue on preferences for emotionally close partners among younger and older adults. Their findings suggest that the motivational shifts instigated by limited future time perspective, like all motivational phenomena, may require self-regulatory resources to operate.
Brothers et al. suggest another moderator — awareness of age-related change. They found that, across age and cultures, only those who perceived more age-related gains showed a less negative relation between limited future time perspective and psychological well-being.
Furthermore, there may be domain-specificity in the phenomenon. Tasdemir-Ozdes et al. found that global future time perspective was not directly related to healthy choices. Yet, across age groups, having a positive view of one's future health and seeing future health-related events as more important were associated with greater intention to make healthy lifestyle choices.
So far, we have reviewed findings that future time perspective can predict age-related processes if three conditions are met:
- there are sufficient self-regulatory resources
- the future is perceived to bring gains
- the future time perspective and outcome are assessed in the same domain
The remaining two manuscripts go beyond socioemotional selectivity theory and describe the role of time in age-related processes from different angles.
Rutt and Loöckenhoff postulated and found evidence indicating that older adults might have a higher level of self-continuity and were more likely to perceive the present as the same as the future than were younger adults.
Working from a different theoretical perspective (Time Perspective Theory; Zimbardo & Boyd, 1999), Holman et al. argue that time perspective may be a personality disposition that influences how individuals react to stress. They found that across age, more 9/11-related TV exposure was significantly related to greater past time perspective; and past time perspective in turn was negatively related to positive affect and life satisfaction, both between persons as well as within persons over time.
In addition to the theoretical contributions described above, the special issue also discusses new measures and methodologies for studying time perspective and aging.
Note: This article is in the Developmental Psychology topic area. View more articles in the Developmental Psychology topic area.