Tomorrow I could be in trouble…but the sun will come out next year: The effect of temporal distance on adolescents’ judgments of life satisfaction

In a series of three studies, we examined adolescents’ judgments of temporal life satisfaction (LS). We based our predictions in the notion of temporal distance influence in the level of construal of near- and distant-future events. In Study 1 we found that adolescents enhance future and present LS while devaluating past LS. Manipulating temporal distance in Study 2 and 3 and examining differences between- and within-subjects, respectively, we found that adolescents expected to be more satisfied with their life in the distant- than in the near-future. Moreover, framing LS in the near-future led adolescents to expect lower LS than they reported one week earlier. In contrast, expectations for own LS in the distant-future were not higher than self-reported LS measured one week before the experiment. The authors discuss implications for theory development and implications in the study of adolescents’ LS.