Emotional Intensity Of The Impact Of The Distance Of Time

Temporal distance refers to the perceived length of time, which is different from objective temporal distance. In previous researches, perceived temporal distance and objective distance are mixed. Although both are associated with each other, operationalizing psychological distance as objective distance makes it impossible to ascertain whether temporal distance influences people's thoughts, feelings, and behavior independent of objective distance. Recent studies show that temporal distance is independent on objective distance. But these researches explore temporal distance directly, and few focus on aspects of influencing temporal distance. The theme mainly explores that emotional intensity impacts on temporal distance.The hypothesis of the paper is that emotional intensity reduces perceived psychological distance. The stronger the emotional intensity, the closer the temporal distance. Study 1 adopted a single factor random experimental design, which focus on an event of embarrassing moments. Participants were asked to perceive temporal distance of the embarrassing events when they were awakened. In Study 2, a past or future test was used with 2(emotionality:emotional description vs neutral description)×2(tense:past vs future) between-subjects design to investigate perceived temporal distance. Data were recorded and analysed by SPSS 19.0. The results were concluded as follows:(1) For embarrassing events, the higher the level of person's emotional arousal, the stronger the emotional intensity, and the shorter the temporal distance.(2) For a past or future test, people used much more feelings, the greater the emotional intensity, which reduced the perceived temporal distance.(3) Although perceptual fluency was associated with perceived psychological distance, the effect of manipulated emotionality on psychological temporal distance was not attributable to fluency.