That Which Does Not Kill You on Wednesday Makes You Stronger On Friday: A Bidirectional Relationship between Resilience and Time

Abstract

Empirical studies on the influential factors of temporal conceptualization have evinced that emotions and personality traits involving the approach-related motivation tend to produce a preference for the ego-moving perspective. Building on this insight, the current research introduced the positive and approach-oriented trait of resilience and investigated its influence on the contextualized interpretation of movement of event in time. Results indicated that resilience correlated positively with the ego-moving perspective, such that participants with higher resilience scores were more likely to adopt the ego-moving perspective when reasoning about a temporal ambiguity than those with lower such scores (Study 1). Furthering the correlation, Study 2 made a causal inquiry and revealed that participants primed with a resilient attitude chose to perceive themselves as approaching an academically stressful event (in line with the ego-moving perspective) more frequently than did those primed with a maladaptive attitude. Finally, Study 3 examined the reverse impact of temporal perspective on resilience and the results showed that participants exposed to the ego-moving perspective-framed academic adversity tended to vicariously approach the scenario with a resilient attitude more than did those subjected to the same scenario phrased from the time-moving perspective. Taken together, the pattern of results supports the embodied cognition theory by evidencing that conceptually disparate domains may be reciprocally influenced via a shared embodied link.