Why a vacation seems like it will end as soon as it begins
Time perception affected by nature of future events, study finds
2021-05-26
(Press-News.org) COLUMBUS, Ohio - Time not only flies when you're having fun - sometimes anticipating a fun event makes it feel like it will be over as soon as it begins, a new study suggests.
Researchers found that people judge future positive events as being both farther away as well as shorter in duration than negative or neutral events.
Combining those two elements has a strange effect when people look forward to a positive event like a vacation, said Selin Malkoc, co-author of the study and associate professor of marketing at The Ohio State University's Fisher College of Business.
"The seemingly endless wait for the vacation to start combined with the feeling that the vacation will fly by leads people to feel like the beginning and the end of their time off as similarly far from the present," Malkoc said.
"In other words, in their mind's eye, the vacation is over as soon as it begins. It has no duration."
The study was published online recently in the Journal of Consumer Psychology.
This phenomenon has another interesting effect: It makes people feel like the endpoints of positive and negative events are similarly distant from the present.
That's because anticipating a negative event - like a dreaded work trip - reverses the effects of a positive event: People feel like the negative event is right around the corner and will last a long time.
"Thinking about future positive and negative events leads people to take two different paths to the same conclusion, with the ends of both events seeming similarly far away," said study co-author Gabriela Tonietto, assistant professor of marketing at Rutgers Business School - Newark and New Brunswick.
The Journal of Consumer Psychology paper included four related studies that came to similar conclusions. In one study, 451 online participants considered the upcoming weekend, which was either expected to be fun, terrible, or just OK.
They then indicated how far away the beginning and then the end of the weekend felt on a 0-100 slider scale (0=very near, 100=very far.)
Findings showed that a good weekend seemed farther away and shorter, while a terrible weekend seemed closer to the present day and longer in duration. An OK weekend fell in between.
On the slider scale, people rated a bad weekend as ending significantly farther away than its beginning. But for people who expected a good weekend, the slider scale ratings for how far away the beginning and the end seemed to them were nearly identical.
In fact, 46% of participants evaluated the positive weekend as feeling like it had no duration at all as they thought about both the event and the time leading up to it.
Thinking about how far the beginning and the end of the event is from the present is key to this phenomenon, Malkoc said. Another study showed that when people were asked to directly indicate how long they expected a positive event to last, they thought it would go quickly, but they did indicate it would take up some time.
It was only when people also considered the time leading up to the fun event - which they expected to crawl - that they thought a future positive experience would feel like it had no duration.
These findings have some interesting implications as people start planning vacations and other fun events as the COVID-19 pandemic ends, Malkoc said.
"If a vacation seems like it is going to end as soon as it begins, it may make people less likely to plan specific events during their time off," she said.
"It may also lead people to spend more on hotels and other luxuries, since it seems like the vacation is such a short time anyway."
INFORMATION:
Other co-authors were Eric VanEpps of the University of Utah and Sam Maglio of the University of Toronto.
Contact: Selin Malkoc, Malkoc.5@osu.edu
Written by Jeff Grabmeier, 614-292-8457; Grabmeier.1@osu.edu
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2021-05-26
SAN RAMON, Calif., May 26, 2021--A new paper that has been accepted for publication in Ophthalmic & Physiological Optics, the peer-reviewed journal of The College of Optometrists (UK), furthers understanding of myopia control efficacy in the context of normal childhood eye growth. Axial Length Targets for Myopia Control (Chamberlain P, et al.) is now available online via END ...
2021-05-26
REYKJAVIK, Iceland 26 May 2021 - Current vaccination programmes alone will have a limited effect in stopping the second wave of COVID infections in the US, according to a study conducted by scientists from Reykjavik University, University of Lyon, University of Southern Denmark and University of Naples Federico II, and published in the Nature Group journal Scientific Reports today. The findings suggest that strict social distancing and other non-pharmaceutical methods are still necessary to end the ongoing second wave in the US and prevent a new one from rising.
The study fed real-world data on human mobility into a mathematical model previously used to predict the second wave of ...
2021-05-26
Researchers have successfully detected the environmental DNA (eDNA *1) of the Argentine ant (*2) in surface soil samples from sites on Kobe's Port Island and in Kyoto's Fushimi District, two areas that have a long history of destruction caused by this invasive species. The research group included then graduate student YASASHIMOTO Tetsu and Associate Professor MINAMOTO Toshifumi of Kobe University's Graduate School of Human Development and Environment, Visiting Professor OZAKI Mamiko of the Graduate School of Engineering, and NAKAJIMA Satoko, formally of the Kyoto Prefectural Institute of Public Health and Environment.
This method can be used to enable scientists ...
2021-05-26
A newly released scientific paper in Nature Publishing's Scientific Reports Journal has revealed unprecedented amounts of highly toxic mercury are deposited in the deepest trenches of the Pacific Ocean.
The study, a multi-national effort involving scientists from Denmark, Canada, Germany and Japan, reports the first-ever direct measurements of mercury deposition into one of the logistically most challenging environments to sample on Earth, and the deepest at eight to 10 kilometers under the sea.
Lead author Professor Hamed Sanei, Director of the Lithospheric Organic Carbon Laboratory (LOC) at the Department of Geoscience, ...
2021-05-26
What information is retained in a memory over time, and which parts get lost? These questions have led to many scientific theories over the years, and now a team of researchers at the Universities of Glasgow and Birmingham have been able to provide some answers.
Their new study, which is published today in Nature Communications, demonstrates that our memories become less vibrant and detailed over time, with only the central gist eventually preserved. Moreover, this 'gistification' of our memories is boosted when we frequently recall our recent experiences.
The work could have implications in a number of areas, including the nature of memories in post-traumatic stress disorder, the repeated questioning ...
2021-05-26
The biological clock is present in almost all cells of an organism. As more and more evidence emerges that clocks in certain organs could be out of sync, there is a need to investigate and reset these clocks locally. Scientists from the Netherlands and Japan introduced a light-controlled on/off switch to a kinase inhibitor, which affects clock function. This gives them control of the biological clock in cultured cells and explanted tissue. They published their results on 26 May in Nature Communications.
Life on Earth has evolved under a 24-hour cycle; of light and dark, hot and cold. 'As a result, our cells are synchronized to these 24-hour oscillations,' says Wiktor Szymanski, Professor of Radiological Chemistry at the University ...
2021-05-26
CLEVELAND, Ohio (May 26, 2021)--Carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS), which causes tingling and numbness in the hand, more commonly affects women than men and tends to peak around the age of menopause. A new study suggests the risk of severe CTS increases in women who underwent bilateral oophorectomy before menopause, and estrogen therapy didn't provide a protective effect. Study results are published online today in Menopause, the journal of The North American Menopause Society (NAMS).
Carpal tunnel syndrome is the most common nerve disorder in the upper body. Although predominately idiopathic in nature, an association with sex hormones has been suggested because of a higher incidence in women ...
2021-05-26
Oncotarget published "Creation of a new class of radiosensitizers for glioblastoma based on the mibefradil pharmacophore" which reported that this group previously identified a calcium channel blocker, mibefradil, as a potential GBM radiosensitizer. They discovered that mibefradil selectively inhibits a key DNA repair pathway, alternative non-homologous end joining.
Then, they initiated a phase I clinical trial that revealed promising initial efficacy of mibefradil, but further development was hampered by dose-limiting toxicities, including CCB-related cardiotoxicity, off-target hERG channel and cytochrome P450 enzymes interactions.
Here, the authors show that mibefradil inhibits ...
2021-05-26
Even among a large group of cancer survivors who were mostly insured, college educated and had annual incomes above the national average, up to 10% delayed care in the previous 12 months because they simply could not afford out of pocket expenses like copays and deductibles, investigators report.
Being unable to get time off from work and being "nervous" about seeing a health care provider, were among the other frequently cited reasons for not always getting timely survivorship care, investigators at the Medical College of Georgia and Georgia Cancer Center report in the journal Cancer Medicine.
Investigators analyzed data from 5,426 cancer survivors who volunteered to share their information with the National Institutes of Health's All of Us Research Program, a historic effort ...
2021-05-26
The pandemic has increased older adults' willingness to receive the flu shot, new research shows.
The study analyzed survey results of 4,501 Canadians over the age of 50 from ten provinces.
Twenty per cent of 1,001 research participants aged 50 to 64 indicated they had not considered getting a flu shot, but were now more likely to given the impact of COVID-19. Of these respondents, 92 per cent inducated that they had not been vaccinated against influenza the year before.
Of the 3,500 participants aged 65 and older, eight per cent reported that they had not originally planned to get a flu shot but were now more likely to receive it.
"The pandemic has been ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] Why a vacation seems like it will end as soon as it begins
Time perception affected by nature of future events, study finds
