Elisabeth Åström

Insights into features of anxiety through multiple aspects of psychological time

Background: It is well-recognized that emotions and emotional disorders may alter the experience of time. Yet relatively little is known about different aspects of psychological time in relation to ...

Broadening the TP Profile: Future Negative Time Perspective

The importance of the future as an arena for planning, self-regulation and achievement has been of considerable interest in past research. The majority of this research suggests that future-oriented thinking has considerable benefits for psychological adjustment and wellbeing. The future is nevertheless not only a temporal space for goal-setting and positive expectations, it may also be associated with fear, uncertainty and anxiety, which may ultimately have detrimental effects on both mental and physical health. Here we present the outline for the Swedish ZTPI (S-ZTPI) which extends the original ZTPI by separating the Future dimension into two sub-factors: The Future Positive scale and the Future Negative scale. We argue that separating the future into two separate dimensions thus comprehending both a positive and a negative valence of the future, adds important information regarding association between future time perspective and subjective well-being.

Time Perspective in Late Adulthood : aging patterns in past, present and future dimensions, deviations from balance, and associations with subjective well-being

We examined cross-sectional aging patterns for subscales of the Swedish version of the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory in a population-based sample of older adults (60–90 years; N = 447). Alter ...

Perceived stress in adults aged 65 to 90 : Relations to facets of time perspective and COMT Val158Met polymorphism

This study examined the relation between perceived stress and time perspective (views of past, present, future) in a population-based sample of older adults (65–90 years, N = 340). The Perceived Questionnaire (PSQ index) was used to measure stress and the Swedish version of the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory (S-ZTPI) was used to operationalize time perspective. Unlike the original inventory, S-ZTPI separates positive and negative aspects of a future time perspective and we hypothesized that the Future Negative (FN) scale would be important to account for variations in stress. Additionally, associations with Catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) Val158Met polymorphism were examined, motivated by prior associations of this single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) with stress (or “anxiety”) related personality traits. In line with the hypotheses, FN was the strongest predictor of PSQ index scores in multiple regression analyses. In a related vein, the dichotomization of the unitary Future scale increased the association between PSQ scores and a measure of deviations from a balanced time perspective, i.e., the difference between a proposed optimal and observed ZTPI profile. Finally, higher levels of stress as well as higher scores on FN were observed in COMT Val/Val carriers, at least among men. This suggests a shared dopaminergic genetic influence on these variables. Collectively, the results demonstrate that perceived stress is closely linked to time perspective and highlight the need to take negative aspects of a future temporal orientation into account to understand this relation.