Back to the Present

Source: CC/Pixabay

In an episode of the 1960’s TV show The Twilight Zone, an elderly resident of Sunnyvale Rest Home for the Aged seizes upon the idea that playing the children’s game “kick the can” will restore his lost youth to him. Watching a group of children playing the game on the grounds of the rest home, Charles Whitley remarks to his roommate and lifelong friend Ben, “All kids play those games, and the minute they stop, they begin to grow old,” and then muses, “It’s almost as though playing kick the can keeps them young." Deciding to put his theory to the test, he persuades the other residents of the home—with the exception of Ben—to escape through the window in the middle of the night to play a game of kick the can. When Ben fetches the director of the home and takes him to the front lawn to stop the game before somebody gets hurt, what they find is not a bunch of decrepit old people shuffling around in the grass but rather a group of children running and playing without a care in the world.

While the metamorphosis of the Sunnyvale residents from advanced old age to childhood takes place in the “twilight zone,” a recent study at the University of Warsaw suggests that the logic behind it might actually have some validity in the real world as well. In his effort to convince Ben to join him and the other residents in their game of kick the can, Charles speculates, “Maybe the fountain of youth isn’t a fountain at all. Maybe it’s a way of looking at things. A way of thinking.” The University of Warsaw study set out to explore this very question—namely, if adopting the mental perspective of a child can activate a childhood self that allows us to live in the present moment as a child does rather than fretting over the past and worrying over the future as adults tend to do.

Defining “time perspective” as one’s “attitude toward the past, present, and future,” psychologists have identified five different time perspective dimensions: past-positive, past- negative, present-hedonistic, present-fatalistic, and future. The dimension most closely associated with childhood is present-hedonistic, which “relates to a hedonistic, risk-taking and pleasure oriented attitude toward life, with high impulsivity and little concern for future consequences of one’s actions” (anyone who has ever had children will recognize this description). Research has demonstrated a negative correlation between aging and a present-hedonistic time perspective, meaning that as we grow older we lose the ability to live in the present moment. The University of Warsaw study explored the possibility that “activating childhood selves” (i.e. prompting people to think like a child) could cause adults to be more embedded in the hedonistic present.

In a series of four experiments, people completed activities that encouraged them to adopt childhood perspectives. In one experiment, participants were asked to think about their childhood and write down a few paragraphs about that period, while a control group was asked to think about adulthood and write a few paragraphs about being an adult. In a second experiment, participants were asked to think of a time when they were seven years old and then complete sentences from the perspective of the child they were at the time; a control group thought of a time from one year ago and completed sentences from that perspective. A third experiment explored the effect of implicit priming, as opposed to the explicit priming of the first two experiments. Under the guise that they were completing a language processing task, participants were given thirty sets of words and asked to create grammatically correct sentences. Fifteen of the sets contained childhood related words such as “fun,” holiday,” and “naïve.” To determine whether or not the concept of childhood had been activated, after creating the sentences participants were asked to fill in blank letter spaces to make words, some of which could be completed to make words related to childhood. Participants in a control group were presented with adulthood related words. Finally, in a fourth experiment, participants were asked to adopt one of four perspectives: first person child, first person adult, third person child, and third person adult (with the third person perspective being the control condition). A photograph of either a seven year old child or an adult was presented to the participants. In the experimental condition, participants were told to adopt the perspective of the person in the photograph and then complete sentences about the person from a first person point of view. Participants in the control condition were told to adopt a third person perspective and complete sentences about the person from that point of view.

Following each manipulation, participants were given the 15-item present-hedonistic scale from the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory (having been told that they were merely filling out a short questionnaire as part of an unrelated study). They were then asked to complete some “forgotten” questions from the first part of the experiment which asked whether or not completing the task made them think about childhood or go back to their own childhood, or think about adulthood or their own experience of being an adult. In all four experiments, whether involving explicit or implicit priming, participants in the experimental conditions thought more about childhood and less about adulthood, and reported a higher intensity of hedonistic-present time perspective, than the control subjects. The results suggest that activating a childhood self, either by thinking about childhood or imaginatively adopting the point of view of a child, leads people to “start to live more in the positively valued present moment.”

The findings of this study have a number of possible applications. In mental health, for example, the finding that a person’s time perspective can be manipulated might prove useful in Time Perspective Therapy, where individuals who experience negative consequences from overusing or underusing various time perspectives can be coached to “engage in activities that support select time perspectives.” The manipulations that prompted a time perspective change in participants in the study could also perhaps be transformed into “intervention methods” that are “complimentary to mindfulness techniques.”

Whatever the useful applications of the study may be, the results suggest that Charles Whitley was onto something when he persuaded the residents of Sunnyvale to join him on the lawn for a game of kick the can. Thinking thus like a child allowed him to adopt a present-hedonistic time perspective from which all that mattered was the present moment in which he and the others were playing the game, with no fretting over the past, and no worrying about the future.