The Effect Of Time Perspective And Construal Level On Eating Impulse

Time plays an important role on decision making and actions in people`s daily life, we need to balance between instant preference and long- time interest every day. Time perspective reflects personality difference on time dimension, which is mainly divided into past time perspective, present time perspective and future time perspective, they represent the mental representation towards past, present and future respectively. Previous studies on substance addiction and time perspective suggest that present time perspective has a positive correlation with substance addictive behavior, and future time perspective is negatively correlated with substance addictive behavior. the former tend to immediate gratification, that`s why they behave impulsively, or vice versa. Eating impulse is a sober desire physically or mentally towards to a given food, it belongs to withdrawal symptoms rather than physiological drive. So present study tries to investigate these two types of individuals` preference on food, that means I will explain the individuals` difference on eating impulse from the perspective of personality traits. Apart from this, construal level theory indicates that the time distance people perceive will affect their mental representation and then have an influence on the next action, when they feel near from future events, they will represent them in an easy way, or vice versa. So I intend to explore the effect of time perspective construal level on eating impulse.In study one, we used Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory to pick out 60 college students with present time perspective or future time perspective to participate in Food Choice Task. We found the subjects with present time perspective have a higher unhealthy food rate than those with future time perspective.Study two use a 2(present vs. future time perspective)×3(high vs. low vs. control construal level) within-subjects design. Time perspective is one independent variable measured by Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory, and construal level is another independent variable, which is operated by Thinking Reasoning Start Task. The dependent variable is an indicator called D value that computed by response time which suggest people`s implicit preference on palatable but unhealthy food products. The result is that :(1) the subjects with present time perspective have a higher D value than those with future time perspective;(2)the people with low construal level have a higher D value than control group, and the control group are Significantly higher than high construal level;(3) time perspective and construal level have an interaction on eating impulse.From what have discussed above, we can draw the conclusion that(1) time perspective affects eating impulse, which the people with present perspective have more impulse on eating than those people with future perspective, it performance on food choice task and implicit preference;(2) construal level affects eating impulse reversely, namely high construal level have less impulse eating, but the effect is smaller than that time perspective influenced on eating impulse.