Hamermesh, D. S., &Lee, J. (2007). Stressed out on four continents: Time crunch or yuppie kvetch?.

Social commentators have pointed to problems of workers who face “time stress”—an absence of sufficient time to accomplish all their tasks. An economic theory views time stress as reflecting how tightly the time constraint binds households. Time stress will be more prevalent in households with higher full earnings and whose members work longer in the market or on “required” homework. Evidence from Australia (2001), Germany (2002), the United States (2003), and Korea (1999) corroborates the theory. Adults in households with higher earnings perceive more time stress for the same amount of time spent in market work and household work. The importance of higher full earnings in generating time stress is not small, particularly in the United States—much is “yuppie kvetch.”

 

 

Hamermesh, D. S., &Lee, J. (2007). Stressed out on four continents: Time crunch or yuppie kvetch?. The review of Economics and Statistics, 89(2), 374-383.

https://doi.org/10.1162/rest.89.2.374

 

 

Zauberman, G., &Lynch, J. G., Jr. (2005). Resource Slack and Propensity to Discount Delayed Investments of Time Versus Money.

The authors demonstrate that people discount delayed outcomes as a result of perceived changes over time in supplies of slack. Slack is the perceived surplus of a given resource available to complete a focal task. The present research shows that, in general, people expect slack for time to be greater in the future than in the present. Typically, this expectation of growth of slack in the future is more pronounced for time than for money. In 7 experiments, the authors demonstrate that systematic temporal shifts of perceived slack determine the extent and the pattern of delay discounting, including hyperbolic discounting. They use this framework to explain differential propensity to delay investments and receipts of time and money.

 

 

Zauberman, G., &Lynch, J. G., Jr. (2005). Resource Slack and Propensity to Discount Delayed Investments of Time Versus Money. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 134(1), 23-37.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0096-3445.134.1.23

 

 

Killingsworth, M. A., &Gilbert, D. T. (2010). A wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Science, 330(6006), 932-932.

We developed a smartphone technology to sample people’s ongoing thoughts, feelings, and actions and found (i) that people are thinking about what is not happening almost as often as they are thinking about what is and (ii) found that doing so typically makes them unhappy.

 

 

Killingsworth, M. A., &Gilbert, D. T. (2010). A wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Science, 330(6006), 932-932.

DOI: 10.1126/science.1192439  

 

DeVoe, S. E., &Pfeffer, J. (2007). When time is money: The effect of hourly payment on the evaluation of time. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 104(1), 1-13.

Empirical research shows decisions about time are often made differently than decisions about money, belying the oft-quoted maxim that “time is money”. However, there are organizational practices such as payment on the basis of time that can make the equivalence of time and money salient and are associated with an economic evaluation of time. Study 1 showed that people paid by the hour applied mental accounting rules to time that are typically only applied to money. Using data from a nationally representative survey, Study 2 documented that people paid by the hour weighed economic returns more strongly in making tradeoffs between time and money. Study 3 showed that participants’ prior exposure to hourly payment was associated with a greater willingness to trade more time for money and that participants randomly assigned to calculate their hourly wage rate expressed greater willingness to trade more time for money. The interaction of prior experience with whether or not participants calculated an hourly wage in predicting participants’ willingness to trade more time for money was fully mediated by the salience of economic criteria in participants’ decision-making.

 

 

DeVoe, S. E., &Pfeffer, J. (2007). When time is money: The effect of hourly payment on the evaluation of time. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 104(1), 1-13.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2006.05.003

 

 

DeVoe, S. E., Lee, B. Y., &Pfeffer, J. (2010). Hourly versus salaried payment and decisions about trading time and money over time. ILR Review, 63(4), 627-640.

Using longitudinal data from the British Household Panel Survey, the authors examine how individuals’ employment compensation—salaried or hourly—affects their decisions to trade time for money. Results indicate that there is a positive association between hourly wages and a desire to exchange leisure time for more money. This relationship holds even when a fixed-effects model controls for unobserved differences among individuals as well as for job-relevant factors, including income, hours worked, tenure, and satisfaction. Evidence also suggests that after changing jobs in which pay schemes change from hourly to salaried, individuals’ preferences remain the same in the short term, but effects of these preferences do decay over time, consistent with the notion of psychological salience.

 

 

DeVoe, S. E., Lee, B. Y., &Pfeffer, J. (2010). Hourly versus salaried payment and decisions about trading time and money over time. ILR Review, 63(4), 627-640.

https://doi.org/10.1177/001979391006300404

 

 

Liberman, N., &Trope, Y. (2008). The psychology of transcending the here and now. Science, 322(5905), 1201-1205.

People directly experience only themselves here and now but often consider, evaluate, and plan situations that are removed in time or space, that pertain to others’ experiences, and that are hypothetical rather than real. People thus transcend the present and mentally traverse temporal distance, spatial distance, social distance, and hypotheticality. We argue that this is made possible by the human capacity for abstract processing of information. We review research showing that there is considerable similarity in the way people mentally traverse different distances, that the process of abstraction underlies traversing different distances, and that this process guides the way people predict, evaluate, and plan near and distant situations.

 

 

Liberman, N., &Trope, Y. (2008). The psychology of transcending the here and now. Science, 322(5905), 1201-1205.

DOI: 10.1126/science.1161958

 

 

Wilson, T. D., Wheatley, T., Meyers, J. M., Gilbert, D. T., &Axsom, D. (2000). Focalism: A source of durability bias in affective forecasting..

The durability bias, the tendency to overpredict the duration of affective reactions to future events, may be due in part to focalism, whereby people focus too much on the event in question and not enough on the consequences of other future events. If so, asking people to think about other future activities should reduce the durability bias. In Studies 1–3, college football fans were less likely to overpredict how long the outcome of a football game would influence their happiness if they first thought about how much time they would spend on other future activities. Studies 4 and 5 ruled out alternative explanations and found evidence for a distraction interpretation, that people who think about future events moderate their forecasts because they believe that these events will reduce thinking about the focal event. The authors discuss the implications of focalism for other literatures, such as the planning fallacy.

 

 

Wilson, T. D., Wheatley, T., Meyers, J. M., Gilbert, D. T., & Axsom, D. (2000). Focalism: A source of durability bias in affective forecasting. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78(5), 821-836.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.78.5.821  

Caruso, E. M., Gilbert, D. T., &Wilson, T. D. (2008). A wrinkle in time: Asymmetric valuation of past and future events. Psychological Science, 19(8), 796-801.

A series of studies shows that people value future events more than equivalent events in the equidistant past. Whether people imagined being compensated or compensating others, they required and offered more compensation for events that would take place in the future than for identical events that had taken place in the past. This temporal value asymmetry (TVA) was robust in between-persons comparisons and absent in within-persons comparisons, which suggests that participants considered the TVA irrational. Contemplating future events produced greater affect than did contemplating past events, and this difference mediated the TVA. We suggest that the TVA, the gain-loss asymmetry, and hyperbolic time discounting can be unified in a three-dimensional value function that describes how people value gains and losses of different magnitudes at different moments in time.

 

 

Caruso, E. M., Gilbert, D. T., &Wilson, T. D. (2008). A wrinkle in time: Asymmetric valuation of past and future events. Psychological Science, 19(8), 796-801.

https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02159.x

 

Andrykowski, M. A. (1987). Do infusion-related tastes and odors facilitate the development of anticipatory nausea? A failure to support hypothesis. Health Psychology, 6(4), 329-341.

78 new chemotherapy adult outpatients were interviewed following infusions regarding the experience of infusion-related (IR) tastes, odors, and body sensations. Development of anticipatory nausea or vomiting (ANV) was unrelated to reports of tastes and odors both during Ss’ initial 2 chemotherapy infusions and during the 2 subsequent infusions. It is concluded that IR tastes and odors may increase the likelihood of ANV. The extent to which the physical characteristics of chemotherapy clinics affect the prevalence of tastes and odors is discussed.

 

 

Andrykowski, M. A. (1987). Do infusion-related tastes and odors facilitate the development of anticipatory nausea? A failure to support hypothesis. Health Psychology, 6(4), 329-341.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0278-6133.6.4.329

 

 

Dodds, P. S., & Danforth, C. M. (2010). Measuring the happiness of large-scale written expression: Songs, blogs, and presidents. Journal of happiness studies, 11(4), 441-456.

The importance of quantifying the nature and intensity of emotional states at the level of populations is evident: we would like to know how, when, and why individuals feel as they do if we wish, for example, to better construct public policy, build more successful organizations, and, from a scientific perspective, more fully understand economic and social phenomena. Here, by incorporating direct human assessment of words, we quantify happiness levels on a continuous scale for a diverse set of large-scale texts: song titles and lyrics, weblogs, and State of the Union addresses. Our method is transparent, improvable, capable of rapidly processing Web-scale texts, and moves beyond approaches based on coarse categorization. Among a number of observations, we find that the happiness of song lyrics trends downward from the 1960s to the mid 1990s while remaining stable within genres, and that the happiness of blogs has steadily increased from 2005 to 2009, exhibiting a striking rise and fall with blogger age and distance from the Earth’s equator.

 

 

Dodds, P. S., & Danforth, C. M. (2010). Measuring the happiness of large-scale written expression: Songs, blogs, and presidents. Journal of happiness studies, 11(4), 441-456.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-009-9150-9