Living in the Past, Present, and Future: Measuring Temporal Orientation With Language

Exploring past and future fluency of temporal landmarks under reduced agency

Significant temporal landmarks often involve high emotionality, thereby deeply imprinting within one's autobiographical memory. In this study we explore the connection between anticipation, temporal landmarks, subjective passage of time and perceived wellbeing. We do this by conducting a three-stage mixed method study including qualitative thematic analysis, AI-assisted coding and analysis, and quantitative negative binomial multivariate analysis of the Past Fluency and Future Fluency reported events (n = 73,244) provided by n = 1,113 participants across the six reported (future and past) temporal horizons (One Week, One Month, One Year) in the Blursday Database during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings show that participants state more past Temporal Landmarks compared with future, while the opposite is true for Utilitarian Activities. Key sex differences exist in men's vs. women's identification of Utilitarian Activities (greater future fluency), Temporal Landmarks (greater past fluency) and fewer Discretionary Activities listed for both past and future fluency. Statistically significant relationships are found with responses about stringency of lockdown restrictions and subjective assessments of confinement. Our study provides novel methodology and findings that demonstrate how engagement in anticipatory behaviour can be considered a type of time work, where an individual intentionally alters or customizes temporal experiences during times of reduced agency.

Temporal asymmetries in inferring unobserved past and future events

Unlike temporally symmetric inferences about simple sequences, inferences about our own lives are asymmetric: we are better able to infer the past than the future, since we remember our past but not our future. Here we explore whether there are asymmetries in inferences about the unobserved pasts and futures of other people's lives. In two experiments (analyses of the replication experiment were pre-registered), our participants view segments of two character-driven television dramas and write out what they think happens just before or after each just-watched segment. Participants are better at inferring unseen past (versus future) events. This asymmetry is driven by participants' reliance on characters' conversational references in the narrative, which tend to favor the past. This tendency is also replicated in a large-scale analysis of conversational references in natural conversations. Our work reveals a temporal asymmetry in how observations of other people's behaviors can inform inferences about the past and future.

A cross-cultural examination of temporal orientation through everyday language on social media

Past research has shown that culture can form and shape our temporal orientation-the relative emphasis on the past, present, or future. However, there are mixed findings on how temporal orientations vary between North American and East Asian cultures due to the limitations of survey methodology and sampling. In this study, we applied an inductive approach and leveraged big data and natural language processing between two popular social media platforms-Twitter and Weibo-to assess the similarities and differences in temporal orientation in the United States of America and China, respectively. We first established predictive models from annotation data and used them to classify a larger set of English Twitter sentences (NTW = 1,549,136) and a larger set of Chinese Weibo sentences (NWB = 95,181) into four temporal catetories-past, future, atemporal present, and temporal present. Results show that there is no significant difference between Twitter and Weibo on past or future orientations; the large temporal orientation difference between North Americans and Chinese derives from their different prevailing focus on atemporal (e.g., facts, ideas) present (Twitter) or temporal present (e.g., the "here" and "now") (Weibo). Our findings contribute to the debate on cultural differences in temporal orientations with new perspectives following a new methodological approach. The study's implications call for a reevaluation of how temporal orientation is measured in cross-cultural studies, emphasizing the use of large-scale language data and acknowledging the atemporal present category. Understanding temporal orientations can guide effective cross-cultural communication strategies to tailor approaches for different audience based on temporal orientations, enhancing intercultural understanding and engagement.

Temporal Orientation and the Association Between Adverse Life Events and Internalizing Symptoms in Vietnamese American and European American Adolescents

Adverse life events are associated with greater internalizing symptoms. However, prior research has identified cross-cultural variation in whether and to what extent factors amplify or buffer the impact of these stressors. Broadly defined as the tendency to focus on past, present, or future events, temporal orientation is a dispositional factor that is culturally influenced and may explain variance in internalizing symptoms following adverse events. Cultural congruence, or the degree to which a factor is considered normative in an individual's culture, may be an important explanation of variation in levels of risk. The current study examines how culturally congruent temporal orientation differentially impacts the relation between adverse life events and internalizing symptoms in a longitudinal sample of 10th and 11th grade Vietnamese American (n = 372) and European American adolescents (n = 304). Results indicated that Vietnamese American adolescents endorsed significantly higher levels of past and present, but not future, temporal orientation compared to European American adolescents. Among both Vietnamese and European American adolescents, past temporal orientation was positively associated with internalizing symptoms and adverse life events. Findings also demonstrated that the influence of present temporal orientation on the relation between adverse life events and internalizing symptoms was further moderated by ethnicity, such that present temporal orientation buffered risk for negative outcomes among European Americans but not Vietnamese Americans. These data highlight the importance of measuring and testing specific dimensions of culturally relevant processes when considering responses to adverse life events.

Temporal frames, temporal focus, and behavioral expectations: The persuasive impact of near and distant threats

BACKGROUND

Ultraviolet (UV) photography and photoaging visuals make hidden sun damage visible to the naked eye, granting the potential to create messages that vary in temporal dimensionality. As UV photos depict immediate skin damage, the photo communicated that exposure in sun causes invisible damage to the young truck driver (near temporal frame) and visible damage (e.g., wrinkles) to the old truck driver (distant temporal frame).

OBJECTIVE

The current study examines the moderating effects of loss/gain frames and temporality variables on the relationship between temporal framing and sun safe behavioral expectations.

METHOD

U.S. adults (N = 897) were assigned to a 2 (near/distant temporal frame) × 2 (gain/loss frame) between-participants experiment.

RESULTS

The loss frame triggered greater fear compared to the gain frame, this fear forms an indirect path where loss frames increase fear and fear increases changes in sun safe behavioral expectations. Participants exposed to the distant frame had increased behavior expectations if either of the two temporality variables (CFC - future or current focus) were low. Participants with low temporality indicators (i.e., CFC - future, current focus, or future focus) exposed to the gain frame had increased behavior expectations.

CONCLUSIONS

The findings demonstrate the potential utility of temporal frames as a tool for designing strategic health messages.

Quantifying changes in societal optimism from online sentiment

Individuals can hold contrasting views about distinct times: for example, dread over tomorrow's appointment and excitement about next summer's vacation. Yet, psychological measures of optimism often assess only one time point or ask participants to generalize about their future. Here, we address these limitations by developing the optimism curve, a measure of societal optimism that compares positivity toward different future times that was inspired by the Treasury bond yield curve. By performing sentiment analysis on over 3.5 million tweets that reference 23 future time points (2 days to 30 years), we measured how positivity differs across short-, medium-, and longer-term future references. We found a consistent negative association between positivity and the distance into the future referenced: From August 2017 to February 2020, the long-term future was discussed less positively than the short-term future. During the COVID-19 pandemic, this relationship inverted, indicating declining near-future- but stable distant-future-optimism. Our results demonstrate that individuals hold differentiated attitudes toward the near and distant future that shift in aggregate over time in response to external events. The optimism curve uniquely captures these shifting attitudes and may serve as a useful tool that can expand existing psychometric measures of optimism.

Economic analysis through alternative data and big data techniques: what do they tell about Brazil?

Alternative data are now widely used in economic analyses worldwide but still infrequent in studies on the Brazilian economy. This research demonstrates how alternative data extracted from Google Trends and Google Mobility contribute to innovative economic analysis. First, it demonstrates that the search for the future on the internet is correlated (R = 0.62) with the average household income in Brazilian states. The three Brazilian states with the most people looking for the future on the internet have an average household income 1.6 times higher than people from states that do not have this behavior. The search for the future represents 10.9% of the economic development potential of the states, while the proportion of people with university degrees, scientific publications, and researchers represents another 60.4%. The reduction in mobility in retail/recreation locations averaged 34.28% in Brazil, Ecuador, Paraguay, and Uruguay. This group of countries had COVID-19 infection and death rates 1.25 and 1.74 times higher than in countries that reduced their mobility in retail/recreation locations by 45.03%. The impact of reduced mobility in retail/recreation locations on the unemployment rate, gross domestic product degrowth, and inflation in countries such as Brazil was 1.1, 2.2, and 2.6 times lower than in countries that reduced mobility more of people. The research contributions are associated with identifying new indicators extracted from alternative data and their application to carry out innovative economic analyses.

A computational approach to measure the linguistic characteristics of psychotherapy timing, responsiveness, and consistency

Although individual psychotherapy is generally effective for a range of mental health conditions, little is known about the moment-to-moment language use of effective therapists. Increased access to computational power, coupled with a rise in computer-mediated communication (telehealth), makes feasible the large-scale analyses of language use during psychotherapy. Transparent methodological approaches are lacking, however. Here we present novel methods to increase the efficiency of efforts to examine language use in psychotherapy. We evaluate three important aspects of therapist language use - timing, responsiveness, and consistency - across five clinically relevant language domains: pronouns, time orientation, emotional polarity, therapist tactics, and paralinguistic style. We find therapist language is dynamic within sessions, responds to patient language, and relates to patient symptom diagnosis but not symptom severity. Our results demonstrate that analyzing therapist language at scale is feasible and may help answer longstanding questions about specific behaviors of effective therapists.

Relationship between Decision-Making, Time Perspective and Stress

Decision-making is a process of gathering information, organizing, and making appropriate choices. Time perspective refers to the ways one perceives the past, present, and future. Every decision-making style dwells in one of these temporal orientations. Within the process of decision-making, there is likely to be some degree of stress. The current study explores the association between Decision-Making Styles, Time Perspective, and Stress among college students (n = 120). Tools used were the General Decision-Making Style (GDMS), the short version of the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory (ZTPI-short), and the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS). Results showed a significant association between decision-making styles, time perspective, and stress. Further, decision-making was found to be influenced by temporal orientations and stress levels. Furthermore, this article also proposes to discuss the application value of decision-making in the process of addressing the challenges associated with career and other real-life decisions.

Linguistic predictors from Facebook postings of substance use disorder treatment retention versus discontinuation

Background: Early indicators of who will remain in - or leave - treatment for substance use disorder (SUD) can drive targeted interventions to support long-term recovery.Objectives: To conduct a comprehensive study of linguistic markers of SUD treatment outcomes, the current study integrated features produced by machine learning models known to have social-psychology relevance.Methods: We extracted and analyzed linguistic features from participants' Facebook posts (N = 206, 39.32% female; 55,415 postings) over the two years before they entered a SUD treatment program. Exploratory features produced by both Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling and the features from theoretical domains of religiosity, affect, and temporal orientation via established AI-based linguistic models were utilized.Results: Patients who stayed in the SUD treatment for over 90 days used more words associated with religion, positive emotions, family, affiliations, and the present, and used more first-person singular pronouns (Cohen's d values: [-0.39, -0.57]). Patients who discontinued their treatment before 90 days discussed more diverse topics, focused on the past, and used more articles (Cohen's d values: [0.44, 0.57]). All ps < .05 with Benjamini-Hochberg False Discovery Rate correction.Conclusions: We confirmed the literature on protective and risk social-psychological factors linking to SUD treatment in language analysis, showing that Facebook language before treatment entry could be used to identify the markers of SUD treatment outcomes. This reflects the importance of taking these linguistic features and markers into consideration when designing and recommending SUD treatment plans.

Pro-environmental purchase intentions in a low-involvement context: the role of myopia and apathy

Purpose

To achieve the UN’s 2030 agenda, consumers will need to behave more responsibly and make less environmentally harmful purchases. This study aims to investigate the antecedents of consumers’ pro-environmental purchase intentions based on a range of motivating (i.e. attitudes, locus of control) and inhibiting factors (i.e. apathy and myopia) for a low-involvement product. It also tests the moderating effect of the greenness of a low-involvement product (green vs nongreen) on the consumer’s pro-environmental purchase intentions.

Design/methodology/approach

An online panel survey of 679 Turkish consumers was used. Structural equation modeling was used to test the hypothesized relationships.

Findings

The results suggest that while inhibiting factors (i.e. apathy and myopia) may not directly impede such purchase intentions, they could prevent consumers from considering the environmental characteristics of low-involvement products.

Practical implications

The insights are expected to assist marketers and policymakers to understand consumer psychological mechanisms when encouraging and promoting pro-environmental behavior in the context of low-involvement purchases, enhancing consumers contributing to the 2030 objectives.

Originality/value

This study examines the role of inhibiting factors behind the purchase of low-involvement goods. It also tests the moderating effect of the greenness of a low-involvement product on pro-environmental purchase intentions.

Investigating the impact of emotion on temporal orientation in a deep multitask setting

Temporal orientation is an important aspect of human cognition which shows how an individual emphasizes past, present, and future. Theoretical research in psychology shows that one’s emotional state can influence his/her temporal orientation. We hypothesize that measuring human temporal orientation can benefit from concurrent learning of emotion. To test this hypothesis, we propose a deep learning-based multi-task framework where we concurrently learn a unified model for temporal orientation (our primary task) and emotion analysis (secondary task) using tweets. Our multi-task framework takes users’ tweets as input and produces three temporal orientation labels (past, present or future) and four emotion labels (joy, sadness, anger, or fear) with intensity values as outputs. The classified tweets are then grouped for each user to obtain the user-level temporal orientation and emotion. Finally, we investigate the associations between the users’ temporal orientation and their emotional state. Our analysis reveals that joy and anger are correlated to future orientation while sadness and fear are correlated to the past orientation.

The forms and meanings of grammatical markers support efficient communication

Functionalist accounts of language suggest that forms are paired with meanings in ways that support efficient communication. Previous work on grammatical marking suggests that word forms have lengths that enable efficient production, and work on the semantic typology of the lexicon suggests that word meanings represent efficient partitions of semantic space. Here we establish a theoretical link between these two lines of work and present an information-theoretic analysis that captures how communicative pressures influence both form and meaning. We apply our approach to the grammatical features of number, tense, and evidentiality and show that the approach explains both which systems of feature values are attested across languages and the relative lengths of the forms for those feature values. Our approach shows that general information-theoretic principles can capture variation in both form and meaning across languages.

Personality-informed intervention design: Examining how trait regulation can inform efforts to change behavior

Research that helps people change their behavior has the potential to improve the quality of lives, but it is too often approached in a way that divorces behavior from the people who need to enact it. In this paper, we propose a personality-informed approach to classifying behavior-change problems and designing interventions to address them. In particular, we argue that interventions will be most effective when they target the appropriate psychological process given the disposition of the participant and the desired duration of change. Considering these dimensions can help to reveal the differences among common types of behavior-change problems, and it can guide decisions about what kinds of intervention solutions will most effectively solve them. We review key concepts and findings from the personality literature that can help us understand the dynamic nature of dispositions and to identify the psychological processes that best explain both short-term variance in behavior and long-term development of personality. Drawing on this literature, we argue that different types of behavior-change problems require different forms of “trait regulation,” and we offer a series of propositions to be evaluated as potential guides for the design of intervention strategies to address them.

Stuck in the past or living in the present? Temporal focus and the spread of COVID-19

Research has shown that the temporal focus of individuals can have a real effect on behavior. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, this study posits that temporal focus will affect adherence behavior regarding health control measures, such as social distancing, hand washing and mask wearing, which will be manifested through the degree of spread of COVID-19. It is suggested that social media can provide an indicator of the general temporal focus of the population at a particular time. In this study, we examine the temporal focus of Twitter text data and the number of COVID-19 cases in the US over a 317-day period from the inception of the pandemic, using text analytics to classify the temporal content of 0.76 million tweets. The data is then analyzed using dynamic regression via advanced ARIMA modelling, differencing the data, removing weekly seasonality and creating a stationary time series. The result of the dynamic regression finds that past orientation does indeed have an effect on the growth of COVID-19 cases in the US. However, a present focus tends to reduce the spread of COVID cases. Future focus had no effect in the model. Overall, the research suggests that detecting and managing temporal focus could be an important tool in managing public health during a pandemic.

Letters to our Future Selves? High-Powered Replication Attempts Question Effects on Future Orientation, Delinquent Decisions, and Risky Investments

Enhancing people's future orientation, in particular continuity with their future selves, has been proposed as promising to mitigate self-control–related problem behavior. In two pre-registered, direct replication studies, we tested a subtle manipulation, that is, writing a letter to one's future self, in order to reduce delinquent decisions (van Gelder et al., 2013, Study 1) and risky investments (Monroe et al., 2017, Study 1). With samples of n = 314 and n = 463, which is 2.5 times the original studies' sample sizes, the results suggested that the expected effects are either non-existent or smaller than originally reported, and/or dependent on factors not examined. Vividness of the future self was successfully manipulated in Study 2, but manipulation checks overall indicated that the letter task is not reliable to alter future orientation. We discuss ideas to integrate self-affirmation approaches and to test less subtle manipulations in samples with substantial, myopia-related self-control deficits.

Children's future-oriented cognition

Children's future-oriented cognition has become a well-established area of research over the last decade. Future-oriented cognition encompasses a range of processes, including those involved in conceiving the future, imagining and preparing for future events, and making decisions that will affect how the future unfolds. We consider recent empirical advances in the study of such processes by outlining key findings that have yielded a clearer picture of how future thinking emerges and changes over childhood. Our interest in future thinking stems from a broader interest in temporal cognition, and we argue that a consideration of developmental changes in how children understand and represent time itself provides a valuable framework in which to study future-oriented cognition.

Social Media as an Emerging Data Resource for Epidemiologic Research: Characteristics of Regular and Nonregular Social Media Users in Nurses' Health Study II

With advances in natural language processing and machine learning, researchers are leveraging social media as a low-cost, low-burden method for measuring various psychosocial factors. However, it is unclear whether information derived from social media is generalizable to broader populations, especially middle-aged and older adults. Using data on women aged 53-70 years from Nurses' Health Study II (2017-2018; n = 49,045), we assessed differences in sociodemographic characteristics, health conditions, behaviors, and psychosocial factors between regular and nonregular users of Facebook (Facebook, Inc., Menlo Park, California). We evaluated effect sizes with phi (φ) coefficients (categorical data) or Cohen's d (continuous data) and calculated odds ratios with 95% confidence intervals. While most comparisons between regular and nonregular users achieved statistical significance in this large sample, effect sizes were mostly "very small" (conventionally defined as φ or d <0.01) (e.g., optimism score: meanregular users = 19 vs. meannonregular users = 19 (d = -0.03); physical activity: meanregular users = 24 metabolic equivalent of task (MET)-hours/week vs. meannonregular users = 24 MET-hours/week (d = 0.01)). Some factors had slightly larger differences for regular users versus nonregular users (e.g., depression: 28% vs. 23% (φ = 0.05); odds ratio = 1.27 (95% confidence interval: 1.22, 1.33); obesity: 34% vs. 26% (φ = 0.07); odds ratio = 1.42 (95% confidence interval: 1.36, 1.48)). Results suggest that regular Facebook users were similar to nonregular users across sociodemographic and psychosocial factors, with modestly worse health regarding obesity and depressive symptoms. In future research, investigators should evaluate other demographic groups.

Future Time Perspective and Real-Life Utterances About the Future in Young and Older Adults

Abstract. Future time perspective (FTP) refers to an individual’s global perception of the future. It has been found to be positively related to life satisfaction. FTP is traditionally assessed via self-report, but recently a few studies have used observable behaviors for assessing FTP. We focused on two real-life behaviors (frequency and qualities of talking about the personal future) and explored whether they could be used as behavior-based measures of FTP. We examined the association between these behaviors and self-reported FTP, and their relationships with life satisfaction. The sample included 55 young (aged 18–31) and 47 older adults (aged 62–83) who completed questionnaires on future time perspective and life satisfaction. Over 4 days, participants carried an electronically activated recorder, which randomly captured 30-second sound snippets from their daily lives – a total of 30,656 sound snippets were collected. Participants’ utterances were coded for temporal orientation. Linguistic inquiry word count was used to analyze the qualities of future-oriented utterances. Structural equation models showed that self-reported FTP was not associated with the two real-life behaviors. It was positively associated with life satisfaction for the whole sample. The frequency of future-oriented utterances and family-related words were positively related to young adults’ life satisfaction. Achievement-related words were positively related to older adults’ life satisfaction.

Language of ADHD in Adults on Social Media

Objective: We computationally analyze the language of social media users diagnosed with ADHD to understand what they talk about, and how their language is correlated with users' characteristics such as personality and temporal orientation. Method: We analyzed approximately 1.3 million tweets written by 1,399 Twitter users with self-reported diagnoses of ADHD, comparing their posts with those used by a control set matched by age, gender, and period of activity. Results: Users with ADHD are found to be less agreeable, more open, to post more often, and to use more negations, hedging, and swear words. Posts are suggestive of themes of emotional dysregulation, self-criticism, substance abuse, and exhaustion. A machine learning model can predict which of these Twitter users has ADHD with an out-of-sample AUC of .836. Conclusion: Based on this emerging technology, conjectures of future uses of social media by researchers and clinicians to better understand the naturalistic manifestations and sequelae of ADHD.

Resolution of grammatical tense into actual time, and its application in Time Perspective study in the tweet space

Time Perspective (TP) is an important area of research within the ‘psychological time’ paradigm. TP, or the manner in which individuals conduct themselves as a reflection of their cogitation of the past, the present, and the future, is considered as a basic facet of human functioning. These perceptions of time have an influence on our actions, perceptions, and emotions. Assessment of TP based on human language on Twitter opens up a new avenue for research on subjective view of time at a large scale. In order to assess TP of users’ from their tweets, the foremost task is to resolve grammatical tense into the underlying temporal orientation of tweets as for many tweets the tense information, and their temporal orientations are not the same. In this article, we first resolve grammatical tense of users’ tweets to identify their underlying temporal orientation: past, present, or future. We develop a minimally supervised classification framework for temporal orientation task that enables incorporating linguistic knowledge into a deep neural network. The temporal orientation model achieves an accuracy of 78.7% when tested on a manually annotated test set. This method performs better when compared to the state-of-the-art technique. Secondly, we apply the classification model to classify the users’ tweets in either of the past, present or future categories. Tweets classified this way are then grouped for each user which gives rise to unidimensional TP. The valence (positive, negative, and neutral) is added to the temporal orientation dimension to produce the bidimensional TP. We finally investigate the association between the Twitter users’ unidimensional and bidimensional TP and their age, education and six basic emotions in a large-scale empirical manner. Our analysis shows that people tend to think more about the past as well as more positive about the future when they age. We also observe that future-negative people are less joyful, more sad, more disgusted, and more angry while past-negative people have more fear.

Detecting Temporal Cognition in Text: Comparison of Judgements by Self, Expert and Machine

Background: There is a growing research focus on temporal cognition, due to its importance in memory and planning, and links with psychological wellbeing. Researchers are increasingly using diary studies, experience sampling and social media data to study temporal thought. However, it remains unclear whether such reports can be accurately interpreted for temporal orientation. In this study, temporal orientation judgements about text reports of thoughts were compared across human coding, automatic text mining, and participant self-report.

Methods: 214 participants responded to randomly timed text message prompts, categorically reporting the temporal direction of their thoughts and describing the content of their thoughts, producing a corpus of 2505 brief (1–358, M = 43 characters) descriptions. Two researchers independently, blindly coded temporal orientation of the descriptions. Four approaches to automated coding used tense to establish temporal category for each description. Concordance between temporal orientation assessments by self-report, human coding, and automatic text mining was evaluated.

Results: Human coding more closely matched self-reported coding than automated methods. Accuracy for human (79.93% correct) and automated (57.44% correct) coding was diminished when multiple guesses at ambiguous temporal categories (ties) were allowed in coding (reduction to 74.95% correct for human, 49.05% automated).

Conclusion: Ambiguous tense poses a challenge for both human and automated coding protocols that attempt to infer temporal orientation from text describing momentary thought. While methods can be applied to minimize bias, this study demonstrates that researchers need to be wary about attributing temporal orientation to text-reported thought processes, and emphasize the importance of eliciting self-reported judgements.

Conversational Time Travel: Evidence of a Retrospective Bias in Real Life Conversations

We examined mental time travel reflected onto individuals' utterances in real-life conversations using a naturalistic observation method: Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR, a portable audio recorder that periodically and unobtrusively records snippets of ambient sounds and speech). We introduced the term conversational time travel and examined, for the first time, how much individuals talked about their personal past versus personal future in real life. Study 1 included 9,010 sound files collected from 51 American adults who carried the EAR over 1 weekend and were recorded every 9 min for 50 s. Study 2 included 23,103 sound files from 33 young and 48 healthy older adults from Switzerland who carried the EAR for 4 days (2 weekdays and 1 weekend, counterbalanced). 30-s recordings occurred randomly throughout the day. We developed a new coding scheme for conversational time travel: We listened to all sound files and coded each file for whether the participant was talking or not. Those sound files that included participant speech were also coded in terms of their temporal focus (e.g., past, future, present, time-independent) and autobiographical nature (i.e., about the self, about others). We, first, validated our coding scheme using the text analysis tool, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count. Next, we compared the percentages of past- and future-oriented utterances about the self (to tap onto conversational time travel). Results were consistent across all samples and showed that participants talked about their personal past two to three times as much as their personal future (i.e., retrospective bias). This is in contrast to research showing a prospective bias in thinking behavior, based on self-report and experience-sampling methods. Findings are discussed in relation to the social functions of recalling the personal past (e.g., sharing memories to bond with others, to update each other, to teach, to give advice) and to the directive functions of future-oriented thought (e.g., planning, decision making, goal setting that are more likely to happen privately in the mind). In sum, the retrospective bias in conversational time travel seems to be a functional and universal phenomenon across persons and across real-life situations.