It is about time: Daily relationships between temporal perspective and well-being

Abstract

This study examined the day-to-day relationships between temporal perspective and well-being. Temporal perspective has predominantly been measured with single-occasion measurement designs, which ignore the potential for within-person variations that may be important in accounting for fluctuations in well-being. A 14-day daily diary design was employed to examine the dimensions of temporal perspective (temporal focus, temporal attitude, and temporal distance) and their dynamic relationships with daily well-being. The results from multilevel analyses indicated that: (a) there is evidence of within-person variability in daily temporal perspective, and (b) this within-person variability in temporal perspective fluctuated systematically with fluctuations in daily well-being. Each temporal perspective dimension was useful in predicting daily well-being. Temporal perspective dimensions interacted with each other such that the daily relationships with well-being depended on both the temporal region (past, present, or future) and the nature of the thoughts (pleasant vs. unpleasant; near vs. far).

Keywords:

• temporal perspective
• well-being
• diary study
• multilevel modeling

Acknowledgments

Portions of this article were used in the Jonathan Rush's Master thesis and presented at the Second World Congress on Positive Psychology, July 2011, Philadelphia, PA. Jonathan Rush was supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Master's Fellowship. Frederick Grouzet acknowledges operating grant support from Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Notes

Notes

1. Due to a technical problem the future perspective questions for the first five days of some participants contained a grammatical error. However, a memory test on the question and a full debriefing at the end of the study clearly indicated that although some participants noticed the error none of them were affected by it.

2. The residual within-person variance for the full model was compared to the residual variance of a model with the significant level-one predictor removed. The reduction in within-person variance from the trimmed model to the full model can be attributed to the included predictor and used as a gross indicator of the effect size (i.e. proportion of variance accounted for).

3. The distance variable (and interaction terms that included distance) was not included in the model for present temporal perspective, because there was no present distance variable.

4. Interestingly, average past focus was positive correlated with average future focus. This is likely due to individual differences regarding tendencies to focus on the present and away from the present. In other words, individuals whose thoughts are away from the present seem to be thinking about both the past and the future. This could also explain the contrast between positive correlations between present focus and well-being and the negative (or absence of) correlations between past or future focus and well-being. The concept of mindfulness (Brown & Ryan, 2003) might explain these findings.