Being Well as Time Goes By: Future Time Perspective and Well-Being

Future time perspective (FTP), in other words an individual's perception of his or her remaining time to live has been a focus of growing interest in psychology over the past decade, essentially in the fields of aging and health.Yet FTP is a construct with a long history. Its definition as an important psychological variable can be traced back to Lewin (1939) who claimed that a person's life-space includes not only a geographical and a social environment, but also a temporal dimension. Lewin defined time perspective as "The totality of the individual's views of his psychological future and his psychological past existing at a given time. " (Lewin, 1951, p.75) and he stated that it influences our actual behaviour ("Persons of all ages are influenced by the manner in which they see the future, that is by their expectations, fears and hopes.", Lewin, 1939, p.878) and asserted that change within FTP is one of the most fundamental facts of development. Later on Nuttin (1964; Nuttin & Lens, 1985) emphasized the motivational aspect of FTP by stressing its crucial role within the process of behavioural construction i.e. intent and motivation. Such a view has been adopted by contemporary scholars: temporal perspective is from now on considered as a fundamental part of intentional human behaviours and, more broadly, of human motivation. Indeed, awareness of the time left ahead of us plays a motivational role since we set our goals within a time context.Despite its recognition as an important construct, FTP had not been integrated into a theoretical framework of adult development until lately when socio-emotional selectivity theory (Carstensen, 1993; Carstensen, Isaacowitz, & Charles, 1999) made it her main premise. Since then, numerous empirical data have been collected. Socio-emotional selectivity theory (SST) fits in the so-called "life-span" perspective on development and aging, more precisely in Baltes' theory of Successful Aging, which has flourished in the late 80's in concert with the emergence of positive psychology (e.g., Baltes & Staudinger, 2000). Baltes has ascertained, through the Selective Optimization with Compensation (SOC) Model (e.g., Baltes & Baltes, 1990), the fact that adaptation to aging requires, in all areas of human behaviour, three strategies: namely Selection, Optimization and Compensation. Socio-emotional selectivity theory (Carstensen, Fung, & Charles, 2003) advances and extends Baltes's work: it is a theory of social motivation based on those adaptive processes throughout the entire life-span. Through the selection of social and psychological goals, individuals play a proactive role in managing the quality of their life, i.e., their well-being.Indeed one central assertion of SST is that social goals are important for self-regulation, social relationships and emotional experiences. Accordingly two broad functional categories of social goals are intrinsic to psychological motivation: expansive goals such as searching for and acquiring knowledge as well as new experiences, and goals that focus on attaining emotional well-being. As Carstensen and her colleagues argue, categorizing a number of social motivations as "related to knowledge" and others as "linked to emotions" is somehow artificial since the emotional system is inherent to any intentional behaviour. Yet this distinction is an heuristic one: it is intended at distinguishing between objectives that represent an investment into the future and will be beneficial later on, from those that focus on emotional well-being and on the subsequent short termed, if not immediate benefits.FTP is conceptualized by socio-emotional selectivity theory as an unidirectional construct assessed on a bipolar continuum ranging from a "limited" future (the perception that the time left to live is short) to an "open-ended" future (the perception that there is a whole life ahead of us). People shift from an open-ended time horizon in their youth to a limited one when they age. …