关键词: 拖延, 情绪, 预期想象

Abstract: Abstract Procrastination, which refers to the behavior of voluntarily delay an intended course of action despite expecting to be worse off for the delay, is a prevalent problematic behavior that diminish procrastinators’ fitness, work efficiency, academic performance and psychological well-being across different time and situations. A recent study indicating that procrastination is linked to difficulties in the ability to form vivid mental images raised the question of whether procrastinators present particular difficulties with episodic future thinking (EFT) or display a more general deficit in constructing complex mental images and subsequent study also found that lower EFT score was related to trait procrastination. According to the decision model of procrastination, people compare aversiveness of engaging tasks and rewards from the task by episodic future thinking. Specific EFT triggers corresponding emotions which are in line with valence of contents in EFT and then these emotions affect decision making by influencing evaluation. However, it is still inconclusive how the EFT influenced the procrastination when different types of expecting were presented in mental image. Here, we hypothesized that expecting for aversiveness of engaging tasks would generate negative emotions, like anxiety and dislike, and increase procrastination. On the contrary, expecting for rewards of completing tasks would generate positive emotions and attenuate procrastination. In present study, we used self-designed experimental paradigm to prove assumptions above-mentioned. 67 healthy right-handed undergraduate subjects free of ophthalmic diseases (mean age, 20.3 years; 51 females) were recruited. The experimental materials are scatter plots in three difficulty levels generated by MATLAB R2014a. Participants were asked to point out the amount of dots in plot and they would get credits (for exchanging Renminbi) after completing tasks. If the error between answer and actual number was less than 2, participant could engage next trial. Firstly, we asked participants did some exercises for knowing well tasks and, importantly, insuring participants could expect content of tasks completely when they were told what tasks they would engage. All participants should complete tasks in three conditions: no EFT, expect the process of completing tasks before engaging tasks, expect the rewards of completing tasks before engaging tasks. When participants have completed all tasks in EFT conditions, they should tell us how vivid they envision and how they feel when they envision in 7 points scale. Before the scatter plot presented, we told participant what kind of tasks they would engage and how credits they could get. And then, participants autonomously decided to engage task immediately or put off task and have rest first. From the state perspective, the results shown that: (1) compared with no EFT condition, all participants procrastinated more in expecting the process of completing tasks before engaging tasks; (2) compared with no EFT condition, all participants procrastinated less in expecting the rewards of completing tasks before engaging tasks; (3) expecting the process of completing tasks would trigger negative emotions and expecting the rewards of completing tasks would trigger positive emotions. Negative emotions predicted the increase of procrastination and positive emotions predicted the decrease of procrastination. In conclusion, the present study indicated that expecting specific content of tasks could triggered corresponding emotions and then affected procrastination compared with no EFT condition for all procrastinators and non-procrastinators. Our results broaden the scope of procrastination study and have important scientific values for intervention of procrastination: we could adjust our emotions and evaluation properly by EFT for tasks in order to attenuate procrastination.

Key words: procrastination, emotions, episodic future thinking