Effect Of Temporal Distance On Level Of Mental Construal Of Future Events

Time plays a important and latent role in our everyday life when we make trade-offs between costs and benefits occurring at different points in time. The way that temporal distance affects the level of mental construal of future events is always the focus of time psychology. Most of the previous studies focused on the features of future events, but paid relatively little attention to the cognitive mechanisms and individual differences that could mediate the effects of temporal distance on future events. On the basis of reviewing the existing literature on theoretical and empirical research of intertemporal choice and time discounting, we explored the effects of temporal distance on level of mental construal of future events, took the effects of the psychological structure of future time and future time perspective into consideration as well. Open-ended questionnaire and forced-choice study were used to collect data , in analyzing data, content analysis and designated valve to description were adopted.With college students as subjects, combining with the two experiment results, the main findings of the research are as follows:(1) In different temporal stages, the subject individual forms different level of mental construal of future events. The subject individual tends to use low-level construal to present information about "nearer future" events, while uses high-level construal to present information about "far future" events.(2) High-level construal of future events in description expressed as relativelysimple, abstract, dull and structured, while low-level construal of future events...