Intertemporal Choice Tendency And The Neural Mechanism In High And Low Procrastinators

High runs of current society and different industries further enhance the speediness and high efficiency in both works and studies. However, the increasingly widespread of procrastination not only poses a main obstacle to hinder the achievements of these targets, but also adversely affects human physical and psychological health. The harms and significance of procrastination make it a focus of all sectors in the society.Procrastination are caused when a person underestimating the importance of a future event and postponing it. Therefore, viewed from the perspective of inter-temporal choice, behavioral preferences and the neural mechanism when making intertemporal choice were studied in high and low procrastinators. Firstly, the questionnaire method was adopted that a total of 350 questionnaires were released in internal students of Henan University to investigate procrastination conditions and intertemporal choice preferences in undergraduates and to screen out subject groups with different procrastination degrees; Secondly, behavior experimental method was adopted to screen out high and low procrastinators(n=21 for each) to participate in experimental duties of intertemporal choice which studies tendency of behavior reactions in high and low procrastinators when making intertemporal choices; Lastly, event-related potential(ERP) analysis was adopted to study cranial neural mechanism in high and low procrastinators when making intertemporal choices. The followings were showed.(1) Procrastination was general in undergraduates and there was a significant positive correlation between procrastination and delay discounting rate. The delay discounting rates in high procrastinators were significantly higher than in low procrastinators.(2) Different experimental scenarios and delay time levels posed significant impacts on response times and selective probabilities in subjects conducting tasks of intertemporal choice. The reaction times under acquisition scenarios were larger than under loss scenarios and in remote future were larger than in near future; under acquisition scenarios, the probability of selecting an immediate choice with a delay time of a year was larger than a delay time of a month; while when under loss scenarios, the former was smaller; there was no significant difference of reaction time between high and low procrastinators; the probability of selecting an immediate choice in high procrastinators were significantly higher than in low ones.(3) Same brain electrical components, including N1, P3 and LPP, existed in both high and low procrastinators when they were implementing tasks of intertemporal choices. There were not significantly different peaks and amplitudes of N1 and P3 in high and low procrastinators; while the differences of LPP reached a marginal significance between high and low procrastinators that the amplitude of LPP in low procrastinators was higher than in high ones. Meanwhile, experimental scenarios posed certain impacts on peak of N1 and amplitude of P3. Loss scenarios stimulated larger peak of N1 and amplitude of P3 than acquisition scenarios.