Topic > Time Perspective in the Construction of Psychology

As stated by Mooney, et al, (2017), the concept that people focus on the past, present or future and how this shapes their behavior is referred to as a time perspective. Zimbardo and Boyd (1999) described temporal perspective (TP) as a fundamental dimension in the construction of the psychology of time, emerging from reasoning processes that separate human experience into past, present, and future time frames. TP is a universal and powerful, but largely unrecognized, influence on a significant portion of human behavior. Although variations in TP are learned and modified by a variety of personal, social, and institutional influences, TP also functions as an individual differences variable. Keough, et al, (1999), describe it as a central process learned early in life that influences how individuals relate to people and events. This process is determined by culture, religion, social class, education and family influences. According to Zimbardo and Boyd (1999), TP gives order, rationality, and meaning to events such that the continuous flow of personal and social experiences is designated into temporal categories or time intervals. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Since TPs are used to store, record, encode, remember experienced events, form imaginative expectations, goals, scenarios, and possibilities, they play a key role in stimulating an individual's judgment, decision-making, and actions. The inadequacy of our mental resources, continuously invested in a variety of activities, information sources and control processes, has led to the storage of a tiny amount of information that is part of our conscious experience. As a result our past, present and future constantly tends towards resources, because focusing on one of them usually pushes the remaining two out of our field of attention. Individuals who focus on the future will likely ignore their past and leave only a small portion of cognitive resources to control their present situation. Likewise, focusing on the present will reduce the resources available to consider any future consequences of present behavior, and so on. Such transitory focus can have important consequences on the actual behavior of individuals. Several tools have been developed to measure TP, but none of these tools were reliable or could be used to measure all three dimensions of time accordingly. Zimbardo's Standard Time Perspective Inventory (STPI) addresses the shortcomings of previous scales that were unreliable or could not be used to measure all three dimensions of time. It provides a simple way to measure multiple time perspectives as individual time profiles and is built on a theoretical basis that takes into account factors that are influenced by TP such as social, cognitive and motivational processes. The STPI was developed to provide a standard measure of time perspective with clearly demonstrable psychometric properties and has been used to predict a substantial amount of personal and behavioral characteristics. There are five notable dimensions that can be used to define one's time perspective, regardless of the existence of the three natural time horizons (past, present and future). The first factor, the Past-Negative scale of the ZTPI, contains a negative and aversive view of the past. The second factor, scale.