Explicit And Implicit Measurements Of Temporal Self-attitudes

The core issue of personality research is the self, which also have crucial role in maintaining mental health and shaping healthy personality. The self is an entity that exists not only in the present moment, but also from the past and into the future. Thus, conducting research on temporal self may be benefit to reveal the nature of the self comprehensively. In addition, the attitudes towards one's past, present and future may play a crucial role in mental health and well-being through one's whole life. Therefore, in the context of Chinese culture, it is necessary to investigate the temporal self attitude in depth. Temporal self-attitudes refer to individuals'cognition and evaluation of the qualities of one's past, present and future.The current study examined the temporal self-attitudes from the explicit and implicit perspective, aiming to reveal the specialty of temporal self-attitudes in the context of Chinese culture, explore further the potential psychological mechanism, and enhance our understanding of the nature of the self eventually. Thus, the current study devised three experiments to examine the temporal self-attitudes comprehensively.In study one, employed self-reference paradigm,32 participants were instructed to make self-reference judgments according to their past selves, present selves and future selves respectively. The results showed that, in contrast with the past and present self, participants used more positive traits and less negative traits to describe their future selves and made judgments more quickly. However, there is no significant difference between the past and present self-evaluations.In study two, to investigate the implicit temporal self-attitudes,33 participants were instructed to perform Go/No-go Association Task (GNAT). The data revealed that sensitivity (d') of the association between present or future self and positive traits were significant higher than that of the association between present self or future self and negative traits. However, d-prime in the association between past self and positive traits were significant lower than that of the association between the past self and negative traits.In study three, in order to confirm the results of study two,31 participants were asked to perform the Extrinsic Affective Simon Tasks (EAST). The results showed when the present and future self was associated with positive attributes the response times were significant faster than their association with negative attributes. However, there was no significant difference between the association of past self and positive attributes and that of the past self and negative attributes.By carrying out three systemic experiments on temporal self-attitudes, the following conclusions can be draw:Firstly, participants inclined to have positive future self in explicit task. However, there were null effects between the past self-evaluations and present self-evaluations.Secondly, individuals tended to have negative regards to their past selves and positive regards to their present and future selves unconsciously and automatically in implicit task.Lastly, regarding to future self-attitude, the results of explicit test was consistent with that of implicit test, but when it came to past self-attitude and present self-attitude, there were inconsistent.