Time will tell: Time perspective as a source for metacognitive emotion-focused coping and its measurement

Mental time travel and time perspective provide the opportunity to shift the experiential perspective, stimulating metacognitive skills for emotion-focused coping. Main objectives of the present studies were a) to construe a rationale for metacognitive temporal coping and b) to develop and validate an instrument to assess individual differences. N = 1283 German subjects (M-age = 33.9, SD = 15.5; 65.9% female) participated in the studies. Study 1 describes the development of a new instrument to assess individual differences in metacognitive temporal coping. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses confirmed that impermanence focus, present centeredness, positive temporal refocusing, and negative temporal contrasting can be determined as four metacognitive strategies with internal consistencies ranging from 0.83 to 0.72. Study 2a established convergent and discriminant validity with regard to time perspective, generalized beliefs, emotion-regulation, and other metacognitive skills. Study 2b showed that metacognitive temporal coping predicted aspects of concurrent wellbeing. More rigorous research designs and longitudinal data would allow to further investigate the contribution of metacognitive temporal coping to well-being and mental health in the future.