Quote of the Day: a Sense of Time and Human Development

[timelets]

When time is perceived as open-ended, goals that become most highly prioritized are most likely to be those that are preparatory, focused on gathering information, on experiencing novelty, and on expanding breadth of knowledge. When time is perceived as constrained, the most salient goals will be those that can be realized in the short-term, sometimes in their very pursuit. Under such conditions, goals tend to emphasize feeling states, particularly regulating emotional states to optimize psychological well-being.

SST predicts that people of different ages prioritize different types of goals. As people age and increasingly perceive time as finite, they attach less importance to goals that expand their horizons and greater importance to goals from which they derive emotional meaning.
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Of course, a focus on emotionally satisfying stimuli may be a double-edged sword. Preferential attention to positive information, for example, may contribute to susceptibility to scams or other unscrupulous efforts to take advantage of older people.

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/312/5782/1913.full