The Research On Youth Students' Past Time Perspective

Past time perspective is a personality trait regarding a personal cognition, feeling and actions towards his/her past psychological time. Everyone has his/her past and past's influence on present and future. The research on past time perspective helps people to look on their past, present and future in a positive way, helps to go deep into perfect personality study, so it has comprehensive theoretical and applying value.On the basic of a mass of literature review for past time perspective, we try to explore youth students' past time perspective's quality, structure, mechanism, function in a way of combining theoretical research and experimental research, quantitative research and qualitative research. Therefore, six studies were designed. The main aim of Study 1 was to design the Past Time Perspective Inventory for Youth Students, as well as to test its variability and validity. The main aim of Study 2 was to explore characteristics of 1225 youth students' past time perspective on five context variables. The main aim of Study 3 was to investigate relationship among past time cognition, subjective well-being(154 youth students), real self, possible self(170 youth students), self-worth and achievement motivation(274 youth students), as well as the possible interactive mechanism. The main aim of Study 4 was to verify whether 184 subjects who have different past feeling experience scores (positive and negative) behave differently on self-esteem. The main aim of Study 5 was to explore the relationship between past action, time management disposition and self-worth across 360 youth students. The main aim of Study 6 was to demonstrate experimentally whether 148 high/low past orientators have self-schema to process positive or negative information. By statistical analysis on above six studies, themain findings of the present research are as follows:(1) Youth students' past time perspective is a personality trait among time dimension, which can be used to predict individual's behavior.(2) Youth students' past time perspective is multi-level and multi- dimension structure, including three dimensions: past time cognition(past time management appraisement, past self-reflection, opportunity appraisement, indulgent in past, past time pressure appraisement, past time value),past feeling experience (negative past, positive past) and past action (planning, goal-setting, goal's congruency, punctuality).(3) Youth students' past time perspective is influenced by five context variables: gender, grade, singleton or not, the place of family and family status.(4) Past time cognition correlates with subjective well-being, real self and possible self. Past time value appraisement and past self-reflection can be used to predict youth students' subjective well-being. Past self-reflection, opportunity appraisement, past time value appraisement and indulgent in past can be used to predict real self. Past self-reflection and past time management appraisement can be used to predict possible self. At the same time, past self-reflection correlative with self-worth and achievement motivation.(5) Past action correlates positively with TMD and self-worth. Such factors as planning, goal-setting, goal's congruency, punctuality can be used to predict TMD for youth students. While goal's congruency, punctuality can be used to predict self-worth.(6) Positive feeling subjects tend to experience high self-esteem, while negative subjects tend to experience low self-esteem. High past orientators tended to process the negative information about self firstly and deeply, and the recall was better.(7) The Past Time Perspective Inventory for Youth Students has good variability and validity.In short, as to the research content, we aim at exploring Past Time Perspective; As to the research methods, we use multi-methods to discuss and demonstrate past time perspective in the step-by-step way; As to the theoretical assumption, we view past time perspective as a relatively stable personality trait. Whether theoretically or practically, this research has far-reaching meanings and value. Further research should include: exploring the physiological mechanism of past time perspective experimentally; cross-culture research, longitudinal research and case study.