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J Happiness Stud (2014) 15:809827
DOI 10.1007/s10902-013-9450-y
RESEARCH PAPER
Maciej Stolarski Gerald Matthews Sawomir Postek
Philip G. Zimbardo Joanna Bitner
Published online: 21 June 2013 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
Abstract Both personality and emotional experiences may be inuenced by peoples time perspectives. The Zimbardo time perspective inventory measures ve trait dimensions related to past, present and future perspectives. Two studies were conducted to investigate how these time perspective dimensions related to mood. The rst study (n = 260) conrmed that ZTPI scales predicted moods including energetic arousal, tense arousal and Hedonic Tone, revealing that past negative and Present Hedonistic time perspectives are the most robust predictors of current emotional states. Moreover, future time perspective proved to predict energetic arousal, but the effect was suppressed by present hedonism. The second study (n = 65) measured mood twice in a 4-week period, and focused on relationships between the ZTPI and recalled and anticipated mood. Analyses conducted using DBTP, an index of temporal harmony based on the ZTPI scores, proved that balanced time perspective was related to more positive mood states in both studies. Findings conrmed that time perspective appears to inuence both recall and anticipation of mood. For example, past negative time perspective is associated with anticipation of negative moods, and Past Positive perspective relates to both recall and anticipation of energy. Time perspective may structure the individuals affective experience.
Keywords Time perspective ZTPI UMACL Mood Anticipated mood
Recalled mood
M. Stolarski (&) S. Postek J. Bitner
Faculty of Psychology, University of Warsaw, Stawki Str. 5/7, 00-183 Warsaw, Poland e-mail: [email protected]
G. Matthews
Department of Psychology, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, USA
P. G. Zimbardo
Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
How We Feel is a Matter of Time: Relationships Between Time Perspectives and Mood
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810 M. Stolarski et al.
1 Introduction
The interest of psychologists in how peoples perceptions of past, current and possible future events in their lives affect their well-being and happiness is by no means new, since its origins can be traced back to Kurt Lewin (1942). Studies (e.g., De Dreu et al. 2008) suggest that well-being depends not only on the nature of events, but on how the person reects on the past. Strack et al. (1985) showed...