Self-Regulation Failure: Procrastination

Blouin-Hudon, E., & Pychyl, T. (2015). Experiencing the temporally extended self: Initial support for the role of affective states, vivid mental imagery, and future self-continuity in the prediction of academic procrastination. Personality And Individual Differences, 86, 50-56. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2015.06.003

Introduction

A common problem when dealing with boring, challenging, or unfulfilling tasks is simply getting started on the task. It can be easy to feel “stuck” and unable to move forward with a project, a relationship, or with life in general, which is problematic because it can distract one's attention away from long-term objectives, influence the specious pursuit of short-term gains, and ultimately decrease well-being. What is especially problematic about these numbers is that the tasks that are being put off involve important long-term goal pursuits. Many seem to prefer smaller, instant rewards, allowing the present self uses the needless delay of procrastination as a short-term emotion-focused coping strategy. The authors hypothesized that higher levels of perceived self-continuity would be related to lower levels of self-reported procrastination, because higher self-continuity would help individuals experience future self as a direct extension of present self.

Conceptualising Procrastination and Future Self-Continuity

Procrastination represents the voluntary delay of an intended action and can be conceptualized as an avoidant coping strategy, which falls under the broader family of self-regulatory failures. Sirois and Pychyl (2013) have proposed that a disconnection between present and future self might explain why procrastinators predominantly focus on present gains while failing to anticipate their own affective reaction to future aversive tasks. For example, one study found evidence that individuals who report low future self-continuity are more likely to engage in self-regulation failures, such as saving less money for retirement.

Future self-continuity represents the extent to which a person feels connected and similar to his or her future self and is central to creating a fluid sense of identity through subjective time. Achieving a continuous sense of self may not come naturally to some, as multiple selves can be experienced throughout a lifetime. The present self's attachment to its past selves has been found to be dependent on the amount of time passed between the selves. Neuroscience research also supports the central role of the conception of self temporally by illustrating that certain areas of the brain activate differently for future self than for present self.

Procrastination and the temporally extended self

Studies have found that procrastinators almost exclusively adopt a present-focused perspective and rarely project themselves into the future. As future self-continuity is important for guiding appropriate emotional responses and daily goal-oriented behaviors, procrasticnation cna be explained as a fragmented relationship between a person's present and future self.

Since the future-self can only be imagined, a reduced or heightened ability to mentally create and manipulate vivid mental images may help explain why certain individuals feel more or less connected with that self.  

Studies

In each of the three studies outlined in this paper, participants were asked to imagine their future self in ten years (studies 1 and 2) and in two months (study 3). Participants were also asked to answer self-report items related to their procrastination behaviour. 

Study 1 examined the relation of future-self-continuity and procrastination and found that future self-continuity in ten years negatively predicted academic procrastination, or in other words, people who feel more connected to their future self in ten years time tend to self-report lower levels of academic procrastination. This may be because these people take into account the self-defeating nature of needless delay, and choose to act more often in the present rather than delay action for future self. Additionally, emotions may affect energy in ways that broaden or narrow one's cognitive scope and influence how connected and similar or disconnected and fragmented one feels to their future self.

Study 2 focused on how affect might broaden and energize cognition to include future self. The study was guided by the proposition that future self-discontinuities may be due to a failure of imagination, as it is this imagination that allows us to perceive a continuous sense of self across time. Previous research has shown that assisting participants' imagination to include more vivid representations of future self can favour long-term decision-making. This study found that positive affective states are related to both the ability to construct vivid mental images and to higher levels of future self-continuity. While vividness of mental imagery was a significant predictor of future self-continuity, the results suggest that positive affective states, rather than mental-image vividness, explain the variance in one's connection to future self in ten years to a higher degree.

Study 3 measured participants' connection to their future self, two months into the future, as opposed to the distant future (ten years) as done in Studies 1 and 2. The results were the same as those from Studies 1 and 2.

Conclusion

In conclusion, it can be said that individuals who procrastinate are more likely to perceive their future self as a stranger as opposed to a direct extension of who they are today. This disconnection between present and future self may in part be due to a failure of the imagination.  All in all, it can be concluded that vivid mental imagery and positive affective states contribute to a broadened cognitive-affective scope, which can be important for future self-continuity.