The Preliminary Study On The Emotional Representation Of Temporal Self Of College Students

Temporal self refers to one's view of past self, present self and future self. There are consistency and inconsistency of past self, present self and future self. The studies of the consistency focus on researches of self-identity, mental time travel and autobiographical memory. The studies of the inconsistency include temporal self appraisal, temporal trajectory of life satisfaction and the different views which people adopt while considering different temporal selves. The studies of emotion related to temporal self are self conscious emotion, emotional episodic memory and emotional experience during autobiographical memory retrieval process. Existing studies of temporal self locus on the individual events and personality traits, but there are little researches on emotional representation of temporal self. Adopting Self-reference paradigm and Emotional Adjectives, we have explored the emotional representation of temporal self and investigated the consistency and inconsistency of past self, present self and future self.This thesis includes two studies. Adopting self-reference paradigm and emotional adjectives, the first study investigates the consistency and inconsistency of past self, present self and future self. Dependent variables are reaction time and percentage of affirmative acknowledgement. Experimental design is 4 (condition of task: self-unrelated, past self, present self and future self) X2 (Emotional word valence: positive and negative) within group design. The task is to judge whether an adjective is appropriate to describe a certain temporal self and respond by pressing the corresponding button. We record reaction time and key-press and perform analysis of variance.Using correspondence analysis, the second study makes a further exploration. Which emotions are primary? What are the relations between emotions and temporal selves? How do they distribute in semantic space? There are three conditions in the experiment: past self, present self and future self. The subjects are asked to judge which number is most suitable to describe a certain temporal self. The subjects must respond as accurately as possible. We record numbers which are pressed and perform correspondence analysis.The results are as follows:(1)The emotional representation of future self is most positive. The representations of past and present selves are mixture of positive and negative emotions.(2)While making judgment, it is more quick to judge emotion of future self than past and present selves.(3)Regardless of past self, present self and future self, the appraisal of positive emotions is higher than one of negative emotions.(4)correspondence analysis charts reveal that the relation between future self and positive emotions is closest. The relation between past self and negative emotions and one between present self and negative emotions are closer.