Future versus present: Time perspective and pupillary response in a relatedness judgment task investigating temporal event knowledge

Plan and Then Act: The Moderated Moderation Effects of Profession Identity and Action Control for Students at Arts Universities during the Career Development Process

Preservice teachers at universities of arts have more than 10 years of professional training before admission, but in their senior year, they face the pressure of the graduation exhibition and performances and the teacher certification examination at the same time. This process is dissimilar to that for preservice teachers at general universities. Such a difference, however, has not been taken seriously in the past. In order to avoid burnout, preservice teachers at universities of arts, when they are under the pressure of limited time, may choose to identify with the departments they are more familiar with for their future careers, rather than identifying with their educational program, in order to increase hope for their career and reduce the chance of burnout. In addition, we believe that the use of action control/state control would also show different adaptation situations in the face of pressure. Therefore, this study focuses on the role of profession identity and action control as moderating variables in the process of becoming preservice teachers at arts universities. We recruited 304 art-major preservice teachers to establish a path model to explore their future time perspective and grit, detecting how the mediation of career decision self-efficacy affects learning burnout and career hope. Secondly, we inspected the moderating effect of profession identity and action control on learning burnout and career hope. We found that profession identity moderates the relationships between future time perspective and career decision self-efficacy as well as between career decision self-efficacy and learning burnout, all of which exhibited ordinal interactions. Furthermore, preservice teachers with high decision-making efficacy had lower burnout than those with low efficacy, but the high-efficacy advantage in preservice teachers under state control in reducing burnout would disappear. Lastly, although professional identification was important, action control regulated the relationship between career decision self-efficacy and learning burnout with ordinal interaction; that is, action control could effectively reduce their learning burnout.

Time Perspective and Bedtime Procrastination: The Role of the Chronotype-Time Perspective Relationship

INTRODUCTION

Bedtime procrastination (BP) has a close relationship with one's chronotype, from a biological perspective on time. However, it remains unknown whether there is an association between BP and psychological time. Therefore, the aim of the present study was to evaluate the relationship between time perspective (TP) and BP and the effect of TP on the relationship between BP and chronotype by examining a sample of college students pre- and post-COVID-19 outbreak.

METHODS

A total of 628 Chinese students (267 in pre-outbreak and 361 in post-outbreak) validly completed the Chinese version of the Bedtime Procrastination Scale, the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory (ZTPI), and the Morningness-Eveningness Questionnaire.

RESULTS

Students with more BP behaviors exhibited greater deviation from a balanced TP, especially after the COVID-19 outbreak. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that the past-negative and future orientations, as operationalized by the ZTPI, contributed independently to BP behaviors. The structural equation modeling analyses further demonstrated that morningness was significantly related to a more future-oriented TP, which in turn decreased BP in pre- and post-COVID-19 outbreak samples, while morningness was associated with a less past-negative-oriented TP, which in turn decreased BP only in the post-COVID-19 outbreak sample.

CONCLUSION

This study indicated that TP in students with BP predominantly focused on future orientation and that TP can mediate the relationship between chronotype and BP behaviors. However, the COVID-19 pandemic may disrupt the time flow and change the role of chronotype-TP in BP. These findings explain how individual differences in TP are associated with BP, which may be helpful in designing effective interventions to avoid BP, from the viewpoint of time perspective therapy.

Cortical modulation of pupillary function: systematic review

BACKGROUND

The pupillary light reflex is the main mechanism that regulates the pupillary diameter; it is controlled by the autonomic system and mediated by subcortical pathways. In addition, cognitive and emotional processes influence pupillary function due to input from cortical innervation, but the exact circuits remain poorly understood. We performed a systematic review to evaluate the mechanisms behind pupillary changes associated with cognitive efforts and processing of emotions and to investigate the cerebral areas involved in cortical modulation of the pupillary light reflex.

METHODOLOGY

We searched multiple databases until November 2018 for studies on cortical modulation of pupillary function in humans and non-human primates. Of 8,809 papers screened, 258 studies were included.

RESULTS

Most investigators focused on pupillary dilatation and/or constriction as an index of cognitive and emotional processing, evaluating how changes in pupillary diameter reflect levels of attention and arousal. Only few tried to correlate specific cerebral areas to pupillary changes, using either cortical activation models (employing micro-stimulation of cortical structures in non-human primates) or cortical lesion models (e.g., investigating patients with stroke and damage to salient cortical and/or subcortical areas). Results suggest the involvement of several cortical regions, including the insular cortex (Brodmann areas 13 and 16), the frontal eye field (Brodmann area 8) and the prefrontal cortex (Brodmann areas 11 and 25), and of subcortical structures such as the locus coeruleus and the superior colliculus.

CONCLUSIONS

Pupillary dilatation occurs with many kinds of mental or emotional processes, following sympathetic activation or parasympathetic inhibition. Conversely, pupillary constriction may occur with anticipation of a bright stimulus (even in its absence) and relies on a parasympathetic activation. All these reactions are controlled by subcortical and cortical structures that are directly or indirectly connected to the brainstem pupillary innervation system.

Recognition memory and featural similarity between concepts: The pupil's point of view

Differences in pupil dilation are observed for studied compared to new items in recognition memory. According to cognitive load theory, this effect reflects the greater cognitive demands of retrieving contextual information from study phase. Pupil dilation can also occur when new items conceptually related to old ones are erroneously recognized as old, but the aspects of similarity that modulate false memory and related pupil responses remain unclear. We investigated this issue by manipulating the degree of featural similarity between new (unstudied) and old (studied) concepts in an old/new recognition task. We found that new concepts with high similarity were mistakenly identified as old and had greater pupil dilation than those with low similarity, suggesting that pupil dilation reflects the strength of evidence on which recognition judgments are based and, importantly, greater locus coeruleus and prefrontal activity determined by the higher degree of retrieval monitoring involved in recognizing these items.

Consideration of future consequence and task performance

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of an employee’s consideration of future consequences (CFCs) in predicting employee task performance and its situational contexts (i.e. organizational support and supervisor support) based on trait activation theory.

Design/methodology/approach

Using a cross-sectional field study design, data were collected from 189 employees and their immediate supervisors in South Korea.

Findings

Hierarchical multiple regression analyses showed that employees’ CFC has a positive effect on their task performance. Furthermore, this study investigated whether this relationship would be varied by relevant situational factors. Consistent with the hypotheses, the relevance of CFC to employees’ task performance would be stronger when they perceive low levels of organizational support based on trait activation theory.

Practical implications

The findings suggest the importance of employees’ CFC on task performance. Also, organizations should pay more attention to the way of compensating for employees with low levels of CFC by fostering supportive environment.

Originality/value

Although researchers have been examined long-term perspectives in the business field, a few studies have examined its effect at the individual level. This paper identified not only the main effect of CFC on employee task performance but also the moderating role of organizational support on the aforementioned relationship.

A time to be stressed? Time perspectives and cortisol dynamics among healthy adults

Perceptions of past, present, and future events may be related to stress pathophysiology. We assessed whether Time Perspective (TP) is associated with cortisol dynamics among healthy adults (N=61, Ages=18-35, M=22.9, SD=4.1) exposed to the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST). TP was measured according to two profiles: maladaptive Deviation from Balanced TP (DBTP) and adaptive Deviation from Negative TP (DNTP). Eight salivary cortisol samples were analyzed using area under the curve with respect to ground (AUCg) and to increase (AUCi). Statistic analyses involved partial correlations controlling for depressive symptoms. Results for both sexes showed that higher DBTP scores were associated with lower cortisol AUCg scores, while higher DNTP scores were associated with higher cortisol AUCg scores. These novel findings suggest that maladaptive TP profiles influence hypocortisolism, whereas adaptive TP profiles influence hypercortisolism. Thus, TP profiles may impact conditions characterized by altered cortisol concentrations.

Pupillometry

Pupillometry is the study of changes in the diameter of the pupil as a function of cognitive processing. This review paper provides a brief historical overview of the study of pupillometry in cognitive science. The physiology of pupillary responses is introduced, leading to an outline of early pupillometry work, which began with the seminal work of Hess and Polt in the 1960s. The paper then presents a broad review of contemporary research in cognitive sciences that relies on pupillometry. This review is organized around five general domains, namely perception, language processing, memory and decision making, emotion and cognition, and cognitive development. In order to illustrate the nature of the method, and the challenges of analysis, the next section of the review details the process of compiling, processing, and analyzing data from a simple, typical pupillometry study. WIREs Cogn Sci 2014, 5:679-692. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1323 For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST

The authors have declared no conflicts of interest for this article.

Time perception and time perspective differences between adolescents and adults

The present experiment aimed to investigate the differences in time perception and time perspective between subjects representing two developmental stages, namely adolescence and middle adulthood. Twenty Chinese adolescents aged 15-25 and twenty Chinese adults aged 35-55 participated in the study. A time discrimination task and a time reproduction task were implemented to measure the accuracy of their time perception. The Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory (Short-Form) was adopted to assess their time orientation. It was found that adolescents performed better than adults in both the time discrimination task and the time reproduction task. Adolescents were able to differentiate different time intervals with greater accuracy and reproduce the target duration more precisely. For the time reproduction task, it was also found that adults tended to overestimate the duration of the target stimuli while adolescents were more likely to underestimate it. As regards time perspective, adults were more future-oriented than adolescents, whereas adolescents were more present-oriented than adults. No significant relationship was found between time perspective and time perception.

Impact of chronotype and time perspective on the processing of scripts

Little is known about the impact of temporal orientation (chronotype; time perspective) on cognitive performance. This study adopted a psychophysiological approach to explore how chronotype (morningness-eveningness) and time perspective (present; future) influence time succession as another aspect of psychological time that is entailed within script knowledge. In a temporal judgment task, participants decided which of the two presented sub-events (e.g., get new batteries-set right time on alarm clock) comes earlier (or later) within a given script (e.g., changing batteries in an alarm clock). Behavioral and pupillary data suggest a differential impact of chronotype and time perspective on script knowledge and cognitive performance. The impact of time perspective on the processing of temporal information entailed in script knowledge appears linked to match or mismatch conditions between a strong focus on future outcomes associated with future time perspective and the task of identifying either the later (future-oriented) or the earlier (past-oriented) sub-event. Concerning the chronotype, evening types process items in which chronological time succession is violated (i.e., reversely presented items) more accurately than morning types. Indexed by pupillary data, the impact of chronotype may relate to more general cognitive abilities. The psychophysiological data derived in this study suggests that evening types typically outperform morning types in various measures such working memory capacity and verbal intelligence simply because they invest more cognitive resources than morning types.