Older and Wiser, or Just More Acutely Aware of Time?

A study recently presented at the annual convention of the American Psychological Society suggests that awareness of an approaching ending can exert a profound effect on the intensity and complexity of emotional experience.

From the University of California, San Diego press release:

To test the notion that time limits and approaching endings add fuel to feelings, Teuscher, a post-doctoral researcher in the cognitive science department of the University of California, San Diego, asked 165 young subjects to imagine themselves in several different scenarios.

Half of the scenarios included an explicit “limited-future” condition, such as the last day of a holiday. The other half differed only in that they made no mention of the future at all. The subjects, whose mean age was 20.68 years, were asked to read the scenarios and then indicate how intensely (on a scale of 1 to 5) they would experience 31 different emotions.

“Given time limits, people showed more extreme emotions — on both the positive and negative ends of the scale,” Teuscher said. “The test results suggest that a different time perspective itself can cause differences in emotional complexity and intensity.”

Every therapist or counsellor in practice will recognize the special nature of the ending of a therapeutic relationship, and the importance of acknowledging and working with complex new dynamics that may arise as the therapeutic work draws to a close. While it focuses on an altogether different type of context, this study nonetheless offers one of the first empirical explorations of the significant effects that just one single variable — the awareness of an impending ending — may have on emotional experience.

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