Negative urgency and time perspective: interactive associations with anxiety and depression

Abstract

Time perspective, which refers to a mechanism of automatically assigning experiences into temporal categories (as past, present, and future), is argued to be a fundamental dimension in the construction of psychological time in addition to acting as a vulnerability factor for psychological disorders. Negative urgency is another vulnerability factor for psychological disorders that are characterized by engaging in impulsive actions when one is under the influence of negative emotions. The current study aimed to examine how the interaction of different dimensions of time perspective and negative urgency are connected with anxiety and depression. Data were gathered from 404 (255 women) individuals between ages 18 and 65 through measures of time perspective, negative urgency, anxiety, and depression. The results showed that while the interaction of negative urgency with past negative time perspective was associated with depression, a similar pattern was not observed for other dimensions of time perspective. Particularly, negative urgency appeared to boost the negative impact of being past-oriented. Similarly, only the interaction of future time perspective with negative urgency was associated with anxiety, indicating that tending to focus on the events that are likely to take place in the future is associated with elevated levels of anxiety in individuals with high levels of negative urgency.