The future is coming : socioemotional selectivity theory and temporal agency

When approaching the end of significant time intervals (e.g., one’s lifespan, career, college experience, etc.), people tend to forgo the desire to acquire knowledge and instead seek out experiences that are emotionally fulfilling. People often encode their experience of temporal passage in these intervals using metaphorical language that assigns agency to themselves or the event (e.g., we’re coming up on our vacation vs. our vacation is coming up). Embodiment theory suggests that our understanding of emotion and motion are intertwined, with positive feelings associated with approach and negative feelings associated with avoidance. This link can explain why agentic language is used within a temporal, and consequently, emotional, context. The reported study explores the relationship between imagined future life events and a communicator’s temporal agentic language use. Participants (N=327) were asked to imagine future life events (a relationship, a job, or a vacation) and describe their imagined experience at the beginning, middle, or end of the event (3 X 3 repeated measures factorial design). A reliable relationship between event component and agency assignment was observed. Specifically, communicators preferred to assign temporal agency to events when describing the end of an event than its beginning or middle, and preferred to assign temporal agency to themselves when describing the beginning of an event than it’s ending or middle. This finding suggests that participants, when faced with moments that are associated with mixed emotions (i.e., both positive and negative), prefer to convey the passage of time by assigning agency to the event itself.