The Relationship between Time Perspective and Self-Regulation

Self-regulation is the study of how people direct their thoughts, feelings, and behaviours in order to achieve their goals. Research on self-regulation typically seeks to explore why efforts to self-regulate are sometimes compromised and how self-regulation can be promoted to enable people to achieve their goals. This thesis aimed to explore the relationship between time perspective and self-regulation. Time perspective refers to individual differences in the extent to which people express attitudinal, attentional, and behavioural preferences for the past, present, or future. Chapter 2 presents a meta-analysis of 282 empirical studies that explored the relationship between time perspective and the extent to which people engage in specific self-regulatory processes necessary for goal striving. A future time perspective (i.e., the tendency to consider, anticipate, and plan for the future) was found to be positively associated with self-regulatory processes and goal attainment, with the magnitude of these relationships ranging from small to medium. This review also revealed that little research has explored the relationship between time perspective and monitoring of goal progress – a key self-regulatory process that has been found to promote goal attainment. Thus, three empirical studies sought to explore the relationship between time perspective and monitoring. To set the stage for these studies, Chapter 3 reviews work on progress monitoring and explains how it might relate to time perspective. Study 1 (reported in Chapter 4) then reports the findings of a correlational study which found that people with a future time perspective were more likely to monitor their goal progress and were more likely to use a wider variety of strategies and information in order to do so. Study 2 (reported in Chapter 5) established the causal nature of these relationships by manipulating time perspective to promote monitoring. Finally, Study 3 (reported in Chapter 6) investigated the mechanisms through which time perspective influences progress monitoring within a specific sample (people with type 1 diabetes) and using an objective measure of monitoring. Feelings associated with monitoring and subsequent attitudes towards monitoring were found to mediate the relationship between time perspective and the frequency with which people with diabetes monitored their blood glucose. Taken together, the findings demonstrate the importance of time perspective for self-regulation, and particularly monitoring goal progress. In Chapter 7, the implications of these findings and avenues for future research are discussed.