Poster #44 - The development of past-future asymmetries in preferences about pleasant and unpleasant events

• In Event: 1-115 - Poster Session 03
  In Poster Session: PS 03 Section - Cognitive Processes

Integrative Statement

For adults, there are affective and motivational differences between past and future: future experiences are more valued and evoke more emotion than past experiences (Caruso, 2008). Moreover, thought experiments demonstrate that adults have a strong preference for pain to be in the past rather than the future, with the reverse being true for pleasant experiences (Parfit, 1984; Preston & O’Sullivan, 2015). However, such preferences in adults have not been studied empirically, and we do not know if children share adults’ pattern of preferences. Changes in children’s understanding of time (McCormack, 2015) and in their ability to think about the future (Atance, 2008) raise the possibility that their comparative valuations of future and past events may differ from those of adults.

We examined children and adults’ patterns of preferences about near-term (yesterday and tomorrow) past and future events involving themselves and others. Participants were children aged 4-5 (N = 35), 7-8 (N = 24), and 10-11 (N = 24) and adults (N = 39). Participants first indicated the extent to which they considered experiences (e.g., eating cake or a painful injection) pleasant or unpleasant. They were then introduced to fictional characters and asked whether they would rather be the person who had had a particular experience yesterday, or the person who would have it tomorrow. They were also asked which person would be happier (pleasure) or sadder (pain) in the present.

Adults (Figure 1) and older children preferred their own and others’ pleasant experiences to lie in the future and painful experiences to lie in the past at a rate significantly above chance. However, adults were more likely to attribute a past preference for pleasure to others than to themselves, and in such cases often cited pleasant memories and enhanced mood. Four-to-five-year-old children displayed a different pattern (Figure 2). When asked about others’ temporal preferences for pain and pleasure, they performed at chance. When deciding their own temporal preferences, however, pain and pleasure were in contrast. Unlike older participants, 4-to-5-year-olds preferred their own pleasant experiences to be in the past rather than the future, and children who displayed this preference often explained their choices in terms of ‘banking’ their pleasures. Nevertheless, 4-5-year-olds showed an adult-like preference for their own pain to be located in the past.

In a second experiment with older children (7-8 and 9-11-year-olds) and adults, we examined whether temporal preferences are sensitive to quantity of both pain and pleasure (e.g., choice between two painful injections yesterday versus one tomorrow). Children showed similar patterns of responses to adults.

Our results suggest that temporal preferences for hedonic goods change as a function of development. Judgments about one’s own and others’ preferences become more consistent with one another between the ages of 5 and 7, and an adult-like bias toward preferring one’s own pleasures to be in the future rather the past emerges. However, temporal preferences regarding one’s own pain are adult-like as early as 4-5 years old, such that even the youngest children prefer pain to lie in the past.

Authors

• Teresa McCormack, Queen's University Belfast
  Presenting Author

• Ruth Lee, Queen's University Belfast
  Non-Presenting Author

• Patrick Burns, Queen's University Belfast
  Non-Presenting Author

• Patrick A. O'Connor, Queen's University Belfast
  Non-Presenting Author

• Alison Fernandes, Trinity College Dublin
  Non-Presenting Author

• Christoph Hoerl, University of Warwick
  Non-Presenting Author