Culture and visual perspective in mental time travel: the relations to psychological well-being

ABSTRACT

Current understanding of visual perspectives (i.e., first person vs third person) in mental time travel and their relations to psychological well-being is largely based on research with Western populations. To examine whether culture moderates the processes, we asked European American (EA) and Asian or Asian American (AA) college students to recall and imagine personal experiences in ten social situations and to report their psychological well-being. AA participants imagined future events less from a third-person perspective than did EA participants, and there was no cultural difference in visual perspective in the recall of past events. Furthermore, EA participants who retrieved positive memories more from a third-person perspective exhibited worse well-being, whereas AA participants who imagined negative future events more from a third-person perspective exhibited better well-being. These findings advance our understanding of the role of culture in visual perspectives during mental time travel as they relate to psychological well-being.

KEYWORDS:

• Mental time travel
• memory
• future thinking
• visual perspective
• culture
• psychological well-being

Acknowledgements

We thank Françoise Vermeylen and Stephen Parry for statistical consultation. We give special thanks to student organisations who helped with subject recruitment.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that supports the findings of this study are openly available in Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/epjuf/. Identifier: DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/EPJUF.

Notes

1 To be consistent with our pre-calculated sample sizes, we conducted all analyses in the main text between two cultural groups (i.e., EA and AA). However, to explore some subtleties between AA participants who were born in the U.S. and those who were foreign-born, we ran exploratory analyses using the same models but divided participants into three cultural groups (i.e., EA, U.S.-born AA and foreign-born AA). Results from these analyses were included in Supplementary Materials.

2 Participants also completed an Avoidant Coping Scale from Wang et al. (2018) that measures behavioral and experiential avoidance (Cronbach’s α = 0.74 for the entire sample; Cronbach’s α = 0.78 for EA, Cronbach’s α = 0.67 for AA). Given the relatively low internal reliabilities and given that avoidant coping is not an index for general psychological well-being, the scores were not included in the current analyses of psychological well-being.

3 Separate analyses for the USDI score and the Flourishing score using the same regression models can be found in Supplementary Materials. The general patterns of results were consistent between the two measures and with that of the composite score.

4 Participants also completed the Self-Construal Scale (Singelis, 1994) that measures independence and interdependence cultural orientations. Only the relative score (interdependence – independence) differed significantly between two cultural groups, whereby AA participants (Mean = 4.77, SD = 11.67) scored higher than did EA participants (Mean = 1.55, SD = 13.44, t(360) = 2.43, p = .02, 95% CI = [.62, 5.82]). The scores were unrelated to visual perspective in either cultural group, regardless of valence and temporal direction. Therefore, this variable was not further discussed.

5 Not all participants reported negative memory, positive future thinking and negative future thinking. Therefore, number of observations between step 1 (i.e., All subjects in the sample) and step 2 (i.e., Subjects who reported mental time travel in the given temporal direction and valence) may vary. To compute ΔR² for step 2 accurately, step 1 models were refitted for negative memory, positive future thinking, and negative future thinking to only include subjects who reported mental time travel in the given temporal direction and valence. The effect of culture in step 1 reported in the Result section and Table 3 were calculated based on all subjects.