The Effect Of Time Orientation And Time Attitude On Self-Confidence

Moderate confidence, one of the basic demands of healthy personality, is invoked as an important psychological construct to maintain mental health, improve the interpersonal relationship and enhance the sense of self-worth, which is. But in specific situations and tasks, how do people construct their self-confidence? Self-confidence judgment is influenced by self-concept; reasoning that since self-concept represents self-perceived competence in various domains (thereby including individuals’ knowledge about extant skills and abilities). It is this knowledge which individuals bring to bear when asked to judge their confidence. Among them, thinking about positive self-related information will increase individual’s sense of self-certainty and boost their self-confidence; on the contrary, negative self-related information will reduce self-assertiveness and weaken people’s self-confidence. Recent studies relating to temporal self-appraisals have found the tendency for people to imagine or visualize the past, present, and future self exists huge valence differences:people are motivated to construct or exaggerate negative past selves in order to feel positively about their current; contrast to devalue their past selves, people always have overwhelmingly positive representations of their future selves. In short, in understanding of the past-present-future, people tend to consider themselves more superior now than they were in the past, and expected to become even more superior in the future. But whether the valence differences in people perceive themselves on past self, present self and future self will have effect on the individual’s self-confidence building process, previous studies rarely involved, so this article will use time oriented which reflects a preference toward past, present, or future as a starting point to explore the issue.The basic idea of this paper was to explore the dynamic relation between Time Orientation and Self-confidence by using questionnaire in the first study. And in the second study we asked subjects to imagine the main events occurred in the past, present or future which can prime different time orientation, and analyzed the confident differences among three time-oriented groups to determine whether time-oriented have effect on people’s confidence judgments. Finally, we approach the time attitude as a new variation into the time orientation-confident constructed model, to analyze the combined effect of time attitude and time-oriented on people’s confidence judgments. This paper consists of3researches, through multi-dimensional, multi-method studies, main conclusions drawn as below:In the first study, two hundred and eighty college students were asked to complete the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory (ZTPI) scale and the general self-confidence questionnaire. Results showed that the general self-confidence was positive correlated with future time orientation(r=.40, p<.01)and past positive time orientation(r=.19, p<.01); but negative correlated with past negative time orientation(r=-.13, p<.05) and present fatalistic time orientation(r=-.17, p<.01); present hedonistic time orientation(r=-.04, p>.05) has no significant correlation with general self-confidence.In the second study, ANOVA showed that there were significant difference on self-confidence (F=6.44, p<.05, η2=.08)among three time orientation groups. Multiple comparison analysis showed that the group of future time orientation exhibited greater self-confidence than other time orientation groups (LSD-test, p<.05). The group of present and past time orientation had no significant difference (LSD-test, p>.05). Therefore, future time orientation was the most conducive pattern to enhance self-confidence.Results of the study three showed that the main effect of time attitude and the interaction of time attitude and time-oriented were significant (F=4.34, p<.05, η2=.06; F=6.44, p<.05, η2=.O8). Further simple effect analysis found:under positive time attitude, confident judgments between the future and past time group had no significant difference; but under negative time attitude, level of confidence was found to be significantly lower in the future time group.In this study, we used the scale and experiment to explore the effect of time orientation and time attitude to the self-confidence. In the first study, which is from the perspect of idiosyncracy, we found that future time orientation had the high correlation with the self-confidence. In the second study, which is from postural time-orientation, we found that future time-orientation group had greater self-confidence. In sum, those two studies showed that future time-orientation was best for our self-confidence. And the third study showed that negative future time-orientation would reduce more self-confidence when contrast with the negative past time-orientation; but the positive future time-orientation and past had no significant difference.