The Nature Of Procrastination

Procrastinate is to voluntarily delay an intended course of action despite expecting to be worse off for the delay. In modern society, procrastination is a prevalent and pernicious phenomenon, and has a negative impact on individual goal-achievement, the physical and mental health, and organizational performance and social benefit. Studies have investigated the procrastination in praxeology, theoretical framework and genetics and heredity, and showed that procrastination was a personal trait. Temporal motivation theory showed that the nature of procrastination was self-regulatory failure. However, the neural mechanism of procrastination is still unknown. This study used the resting-state function connectivity(FC), combing the questionnaires(77 subjects), investigated whether there was relationship between the procrastination and the self-control network and the valuation network. Statistics analysis showed that the there was a significantly negative relationship between the scores of the procrastination and self-control. The FC-behavior correlation analysis showed that: 1) the severity of procrastination was significantly negatively correlated with the strength of functional connectivity between the dorsal-lateral prefrontal cortex(DLPFC) and the inferior frontal gyrus(IFG), the inferior frontal gyrus and the inferior parietal gyrus; 2) the severity of procrastination was significantly negatively correlated with the strength of functional connectivity of the valuation network(ventral-medial prefrontal cortex, precuneus); 3) the ability of the self-control was significantly positively correlated with the strength of functional connectivity of the slef-control network(mainly in the DLPFC and IFG); 4) the delay discounting value(the tendency to be impulsive) across subjects was significantly negatively correlated with the strength of functional connectivity of the valuation network. Moreover, we used voxel-based morphometry(VBM)(75 subjects) to investigated relationship of the severity of procrastination and the gray matter volume and we found a significantly negative relationship between them in anterior insula and inferior frontal gurus after we control the confounding effect from age and sex. Multcovariate regression analysis showed that the ability of the self-control, the functional connectivity of valuation network, the functional connectivity of self-control network, and the gray matter volume of the anterior insula could significantly predict procrastination. In summary, our study revealed the functional connectivity and morphometry of the self-control brain areas can predict procrastination and for the first time we provided neural evidence for the temporal motivation theory.