Research On Impulsivity And Delay Discounting Differences Between High And Low Procrastinators

As a sort of complex and familiar psychological phenomenon, procrastination is prevalent among common people especially college students. Researchers have found that procrastination is not only adversely effected on academic achievement, goal accomplishment and personal health, but also widely related with personality, cognition, affection, motivation and so on. Now procrastinatioin is generally defined as a trait or behavioral disposition to postpone or delay performing tasks or making decisions.In the twenty years, procrastination phenomenon has received widely attention by personality, educational, clinical psychology in foreign countries, and brought to abundant and valuable research results. But in our country, the studies of procrastination werejust at the beginning of summarizing literatures and introducing theories. Combining with the new trend of procrastination studies overseas, this article focused on the impulsivity traits and behavioral characters of procrastinators, and has received meaningful outcomes by using personality scales and behavioral experiments, measuring the impulsivity traits and delay discounting degrees of procrastinators.The paper first synthetically summarized the concepts, types, characters, effects and related factors, and then drew the hypotheses of impulsivity and delay discounting related to procrastination. Impulsivity is defined as a predisposition toward rapid, unplanned reactions to internal or external stimuli without regard to the negative consequences of these reactions to the impulsive individual or to others. At present, the main methods of measuring impulsivity are self-report questionnaires and laboratory measurements. The delay discounting paradigm is a commonly used technique of behavioral experiment task. Delay discounting refers to the fact that the subjective value judgment of delayed rewards is often lower than the actual value of rewards. That is, people make the discount of the delayed rewards. The discounting hypothesis of impulsivity considers that the impulsive individual discounts the delayed rewards more steeply than the non-impulsive one. So, we can quantitatively measure people's impulsive behavior through delay discounting rate. Whereas there was no effective measure instrument in China, Lay's the General Procrastination Scale (student version) was translated and revised in Study 1. Then the reliability and validity of the scale was examined according to the psychometrics. The results revealed that except for item 1 which was eliminated due to low differential validity, the revised General Procrastination Scale consisting of the rest 19 items had good reliability and validity. So it can be used to measure and study procrastination behavior of college students in the Chinese society and culture.Study 2 explored the impulsivity character and delay, discounting differences of procrastinators, using Barratt Impulsivity Scale-11 and delay discounting paradigm. The result indicated that: (1) There was significant positive correlation between procrastination and impulsivity, and high procrastinators had higher degree of non-planning impulsivity, attentional impulsivity and motor impulsivity; (2) There were no significant differences on delay discounting rate between high and low procrastinators. But in the almost every experimental condition, high procrastinators had higher delay discounting rate than low ones.The achievement of this research was that the General Procrastination Scale was translated and revised to Chinese edition, the reliability and validity was examined, which has solved the problem that lacking effective measurement ways of procrastination in our country; that the relationship of impulsivity personality and trait procrastination was validated, the relationship of procrastination and delay discounting rate was examined and analyzed through using delay discounting paradigm for the first time. The discovery of that procrastinators having impulsivity character has significance to comprehend the reason of procrastination and to intervene the dilatory behavior. Furthermore, although this study hasn't validated the delay discounting hypothesis, the research outcome of that high procrastinators have higher delay discounting rate, and the delay duration and reward amount significantly affected the delay discounting rate, has important elicitation for intervening dilatory behavior. So the article indicated that we can reduce procrastination through restraining impulsivity and intensifying timely. The paper also discussed applicability of delay discounting paradigm in the Chinese culture, the limitation of this study, and the orientation of the future research.