The Effect Of Intertemporal Choice On Experienced Well-being Under Stress: The Mediating Role Of Perceived Control

The definition of intertemporal choice is making choices between outcomes that occur at different time.In our daily lives,we are often faced with intertemporal choices that directly impact our well-being.In recent years,with the improvement of people’s living standards,more and more people begin to focus on how to make decisions to make them happier.Experienced well-being is derived from the experienced utility proposed by Kahneman.It is the statistical result of emotions experienced in a short time with moment evaluation method,which can better reflect the nature of happiness.Considering the lack of researches on the relation between intertemporal choice and experienced well-being,this study focuses on the influence of intertemporal choice on the experienced well-being,and the moderating effect of stress,and attempts to analyze its internal reasons from the perspective of perceived control.In experiment 1,taking the college students as subjects,the related research is adopted to study the relation between intertemporal choice and experienced well-being.The results show that in the task with a short delay period(29s,15 s,7s),the more preference for the larger and later choice,the higher the experienced well-being.While in the task with a long delay period(72s,56s),the preference of intertemporal choice has no significant effect on experienced well-being.In experiment 2,in order to investigate whether the stress has a moderating effect on the relation between intertemporal choice and experienced well-being,a single-factor two-level(high/low stress)between-subjects design is adopted.And considering the external validity of the experiment and representativeness of samples,employees are selected as subjects.The results show that stress plays a moderating role in the influence of intertemporal choice on experienced well-being.In the task with a long delay period(72s,56 s,29s,15s),the more preference for the smaller and shorter choice,the higher the experienced well-being in high-stress group,and the intertemporal choice has no significant effect on experienced well-being in low-stress group.In the task with a short delay period(7s),the intertemporal choice has no significant effect on experienced well-being in high-stress group,and the more preference for the larger and later choice,the higher the experienced well-being in low-stress group.In experiment 3,the mediating role of perceived control is further explored on the basis of experiment 2.The results show that perceived control plays a partial mediating role in the interaction of stress and intertemporal choice on experienced well-being in the task with a long delay time(72s,56 s,29s,15s).However,the mediating effect of perceived control was not found in the task with a short delay time(7s).In general,this study finds that intertemporal choice can affect individuals’ experienced well-being,and the interaction of stress and intertemporal choice affects individuals’ experiential well-being through the mediation of perceived control.This study not only broadens the research field of intertemporal choice,but also provides new explanations and value judgments for different preferences of intertemporal choice under stress from a positive perspective of experienced well-being,which has important theoretical significance.Meanwhile,this study also has important practical significance,which can help people make more suitable choices in real life to gain more happiness.