The influence of a sense of time on human development

Abstract

The subjective sense of future time plays an essential role in human motivation. Gradually, time left becomes a better predictor than chronological age for a range of cognitive, emotional, and motivational variables. Socioemotional selectivity theory maintains that constraints on time horizons shift motivational priorities in such a way that the regulation of emotional states becomes more important than other types of goals. This motivational shift occurs with age but also appears in other contexts (for example, geographical relocations, illnesses, and war) that limit subjective future time.

Fig. 1

An example of one pair of advertisements used to study age differences in preferences and memory for products. In each pair, the advertisements were identical except for the slogan. One slogan was related to gaining knowledge. The second promised an emotionally meaningful reward (14).

Fig. 2

The percentage of signal change in amygdala activation in response to emotionally positive, emotionally neutral, and emotionally negative images. Younger people show significantly increased activation in response to positive and negative images. Older people show increased activation only in response to positive images (20). [Adapted from Mather et al. (2004)]