It’s about time: How integral affect increases impatience.

Abstract

Affect is integral to most decisions involving temptation. For instance, people may have difficulty saving for a house because they keep spending money on enjoyable, but more immediate items and events (e.g., fancy dinners). Little is known about how affect influences these types of intertemporal decisions. On the one hand, studies investigating the influence of incidental affect (i.e., affect that is unrelated to a decision, such as a person's mood) suggest that positive affect leads to increased impatience. On the other hand, studies on the role of integral affect (i.e., affect that is caused by the decision itself) in risky choice suggest a stronger focus on outcomes, which would result in increased patience. This investigation uses a delay discounting task to test whether integral affect is related to impatient behavior. In addition, it examines how affect impacts time perception. In a within-subjects design, choices between options with relatively affect-rich and relatively affect-poor outcomes were compared. Participants also completed a future time judgment task. Across 2 studies (N ϭ 23 and N ϭ 56), findings consistently showed that positive affect leads to changes in time perception. Participants judged future durations to be longer when considering options associated with high positive affect than when considering options with lower positive affect. In addition, in the second study we found evidence that affect impacts time attribute weighting. Importantly, our results suggest that changes in future time judgment may influence the propensity to make impatient choices without changing discounting per se.

“Carpe Diem?”: Disjunction Effect of Incidental Affect on Intertemporal Choice

“…Similar to the findings of integral affect and other related studies (Geoffard and Luchini, 2010;Laube and van den Bos, 2020), the current research also found that after the priming of positive affect, individuals subjective time perception was longer. Moreover, in Study 2, we also revealed that incidental affect will also lead individuals to pay more attention to the delay attribute of IC.…”

“…To control for the impact of time perception differences on decision-making results, we integrated the subjective time estimate into the intertemporal decision model and replaced the time parameter t in the intertemporal decision model with the corresponding subjective time Perception T and estimated and compared the model parameters of the different participant conditions (Laube and van den Bos, 2020).…”

“…Affect is a central driving force behind decision making, impacting it either positively or negatively. Previous studies have shown that affect influences intertemporal preferences by changing time perception (Ifcher and Zarghamee, 2011;Laube and van den Bos, 2020). According to the Hot/Cool-System hypothesis, there is a "cool cognitive system" and "hot emotional system, " where affect has a greater influence on preferences of immediate reward/loss (Metcalfe and Mischel, 1999;Hirsh et al, 2010).…”

“…That is, attributes of affect, such as source, valence, intensity, and motivation, could change time perception by influencing physiological activation and the allocation of attention resources (Buhusi and Meck, 2006;Gil and Droit-Volet, 2012). Laube and van den Bos (2020) found that integral affect influences impatient behavior because it leads distortions in time perception and thus alters the weighting of choice attributes. In their study, to control for the influence of time perception on decision making, researchers integrated subjective time estimates into a dual-parameter hyperbolic discounting model for IC.…”

How a second language and its future time reference impacts intertemporal decision: A holistic perspective

“…In addition to the temporal discounting variable per se, the current study expanded the range of intertemporal-related variables to two potential mediators proposed by LSH, i.e., future orientation and subjective future perception. This was built on the finding in previous studies that, even though temporal discounting preferences can remain unchanged, changes in indirect factors (e.g., subjective future perception) can still exert an influence to produce impatient decisions (Laube & van den Bos, 2020). In contrast to the above-mentioned null language effect on intertemporal decision, we identified a consistent strong-FTR L2 effect on weak-FTR L1 users' future orientation, as well as an unstable effect on their future perception.…”