1. Introduction
A magnitude-7.9 earthquake struck Sichuan province in China on 12 May 2008. The disaster on an immense scale not only caused mass destruction and loss of life, but also changed local people’s awareness, lifestyles, and sense of values (Forest, Kille, Wood, & Stehouwer, Reference Forest, Kille, Wood and Stehouwer2015; Vardy & Atkinson, Reference Vardy and Atkinson2019). For instance, more residents got divorced in this area than in any other part of the country (Rockman, Reference Rockman2010). Sociology expert Guang Wei speculated that “many Sichuan residents began thinking life was short and unpredictable, and decided to live each day to the fullest … Life is more valuable than property” (Huang, Reference Huang2010, paras. 9–10, 15). These speculations were tested empirically in later studies. In one study, Li, Li, and Liu (Reference Li, Li and Liu2011) found that participants in the affected area discounted delayed gains and losses more steeply after the earthquake than before it. These findings suggest that people coping with environmental adversity might take a short-term time orientation in inter-temporal decision-making.
Indeed, a handful of studies suggest that traumatic environmental experience exerts a powerful influence on people’s temporal orientation, which refers to individuals’ characteristic thinking about one of the three distinctive time zones, namely, past, present, and future (Shipp & Aeon, Reference Shipp and Aeon2019; Zimbardo & Boyd, Reference Zimbardo and Boyd2008). For example, a prominent feature of patients with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is that they are often overtaken by repetitive images of traumatic events and flashbacks of a traumatic experience (van der Kolk & van der Hart, Reference van der Kolk and van der Hart1989). In a seminal study, Holman and Silver (Reference Holman and Silver1998) investigated the linkage between temporal orientation and long-term distress in individuals who had experienced a negative traumatic event. The results showed that there was a strong correlation between past time orientation and psychological stress with traumatic experience.
In addition to the substantial evidence indicating that prior traumatic events are positively associated with a past time orientation, a burgeoning literature has shown that traumatic events may yield patterns of activity in the oculomotor system which correspond to past orientation. For instance, in a very recent study, Pfaltz et al. (Reference Pfaltz, Plichta, Bockisch, Jellestad, Schnyder and Stocker2021) investigated eye-movements during processing of an ambiguous time phrase (e.g., Next Wednesday’s meeting has been moved forward two days. What day is the meeting on now?) in patients with PTSD. They found that, whereas healthy people without a trauma story unconsciously visualized a mental timeline as an upward path in which the future is placed in a higher position than the past, patients with PTSD exhibited a reversed pattern, displaying downward eye-movements. This is possibly because individuals with PTSD appear to show a passive outlook toward the future (Stocker, Reference Stocker2020). These findings suggest that intense preoccupation with the traumatic environment might hinder goal-oriented future thinking and thus result in past-oriented thinking. Taken together, this body of work provides empirical support for the view that traumatized people are mentally ‘stuck in the past’ (Holman & Silver, Reference Holman and Silver1998; Janet, Reference Janet1925).
Cognitive science researchers have found that space is the basis for linguistic and mental representations of time (Borodistky, Reference Boroditsky2018; Lakoff & Johnson, Reference Lakoff and Johnson1980; Núñez & Cooperrider, Reference Núñez and Cooperrider2013; but see Rodríguez, Reference Rodríguez2019; Sinha, Sinha, Zinken, & Sampaio, Reference Sinha, Sinha, Zinken and Sampaio2011, for alternative findings). Across many languages and cultures, people generally conceptualize time on a sagittal axis, with the future being located in front of them and the past behind (Clark, Reference Clark and Moore1973). However, the directions of space–time mappings in language and thought may not always go hand in hand (Casasanto & Jasmin, Reference Casasanto and Jasmin2012). For instance, Moroccan speakers predominantly gestured about time according to the past-in-front mapping despite their spoken metaphors mapping future events onto a frontal position (Casasanto, Reference Casasanto and Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk2016; but see Mohamed, Reference Mohamed2018, for a different view). According to the Temporal Focus Hypothesis (TFH), the metaphorical sagittal orientation of time in space is largely conditioned by people’s tendency to think about the past and/or future (de la Fuente, Santiago, Román, Dumitrache, & Casasanto, Reference de la Fuente, Santiago, Román, Dumitrache and Casasanto2014). For instance, people who tend to be past-focused demonstrate a preference for conceptualizing the past as in front of them, “in the location where they could focus on the past literally with their eyes if past events were physical objects that could be seen” (de la Fuente et al., Reference de la Fuente, Santiago, Román, Dumitrache and Casasanto2014, p. 1684).
Cross-cultural data support the TFH’s prediction of the effect of temporal attention on implicit space–time mappings (e.g., Li, Bui, & Cao, Reference Li, Bui and Cao2018, for Vietnamese; Gu, Zheng, & Swerts, Reference Gu, Zheng and Swerts2019, for Chinese). The original experiment by de la Fuente et al. (Reference de la Fuente, Santiago, Román, Dumitrache and Casasanto2014) was conducted with Spaniards and Moroccans. They found that the former tended to conceptualize the future as in front, while the latter showed the opposite tendency. The divergence in space–time mappings between the two groups can be accounted for by their cultural attitudes toward time, with Spaniards having a dominant focus on futurity such as scientific advancement and technological innovations, and Moroccans focusing their attention predominantly on the past, such as respect for traditions and promulgation of cultural values. More recently, Callizo-Romero et al. (Reference Callizo-Romero, Tutnjević, Pandza, Ouellet, Kranjec, Ilić and Santiago2020) tested the generality of the TFH in 22 African, American, Asian, and European (sub)cultural groups (N = 2097). The analysis on the entire dataset showed that temporal focus plays a critical role in shaping people’s mental space–time mappings, which suggests that the TFH is a cross-cultural principle of temporal spatialization.
Recent lines of evidence indicate that a broad range of biological, environmental, and psychological factors underpinning temporal focus may influence people’s mental space–time mappings (Bylund, Gygax, Samuel, & Athanasopoulos, Reference Bylund, Gygax, Samuel and Athanasopoulos2020; Li & Cao, Reference Li and Cao2018, Reference Li and Cao2020a, Reference Li and Cao2020b). For instance, Li and Cao (Reference Li and Cao2017) found that people residing in the Hutong areas, a symbol of the long history of Beijing city, were more likely to think about time according to the past-in-front mapping, while people living in modern apartments, representing the latest trends in lifestyle, were more likely to think about time according to the future-in-front mapping. In a more recent study, Li and Cao (Reference Li and Cao2021) investigated the effect of environmental threats such as infectious diseases on people’s time spatializations. They found that participants who were primed with news reports related to the COVID-19 pandemic increased their attention to the past and produced more past-in-front mapping than did participants in the control condition. These findings suggest that environmental forces may play a role in the construction of spatial representations of time.
Despite an initial stream of research addressing the inter-connections among daily environments, temporal focus, and implicit space–time mappings, there are several gaps in prior research that motivate the present investigation. First, since spatial representations of time vary across culture, context, and individuals, a complete understanding of any kind of temporal experience should be based on joint consideration of various factors. However, previous research has primarily focused on the relationship between common daily experiences and spatial conceptions of time. There remains a paucity of information regarding the role of traumatic events in the emergence of space–time mappings. Second, despite some studies examining the influence of long-term psychological distress following trauma (e.g., fire, childhood incest, and war experiences) on temporal orientation, less research has been conducted with respect to other traumatic experiences, such as earthquakes. Thus, it remains unknown whether past earthquake experience has a similar effect on people’s mental space–time mappings. Finally, abundant evidence has shown that individuals’ spatial representations of time depend on a rich variety of factors (de la Fuente et al., Reference de la Fuente, Santiago, Román, Dumitrache and Casasanto2014; Li & Cao, Reference Li and Cao2018, Reference Li and Cao2020a). Therefore, to carefully control these variables, it would be preferable to find the same or closely matched populations as comparison groups. To address these conceptual and methodological issues, the present research adopted the ‘just minimal difference” paradigm that allows more precise testing of the role of earthquakes in the formation of implicit space–time mappings and controlling for as many confounding variables as possible in order to test the hypothesis (Li & Cao, Reference Li and Cao2019a; Uskul, Kitayama, & Nisbett, Reference Uskul, Kitayama and Nisbett2008).
I delve into this literature to make predictions regarding how natural disaster events will increase the tendency to think about the past in individuals in the aftermath of trauma and ultimately alter the direction of mental space–time mappings. Similarly, people would focus less on past events and produce fewer past-in-front mappings as the impact of disaster decays over time. To test these predictions, two field surveys were conducted to investigate the inter-connections among natural disaster, temporal focus, and space–time mappings. Study 1 compared the responses of residents in an earthquake-devastated area about two weeks after the disaster occurred with those of residents in a non-disaster area. In Study 2, a follow-up survey was administered ten months after the earthquake.
2. Study 1
2.1. method
2.1.1. Participants
Using the popular social media platforms (e.g., Wechat, QQ, Weibo) in China, a total of 240 adult residents (non-student subjects) from Yibin (N = 115) and Guang’an cities (N = 125) in Sichuan province were recruited to complete the study in person. The sample sizes varied depending on the availability of participants in the two cities and on the funding of the research program. To reduce the inherent flexibility (or researcher degrees of freedom) involved in the study, no statistical analysis was conducted until all data collection had been completed.
On 17 June 2019, another 6.0 magnitude earthquake, the largest earthquake recorded within the southern Sichuan Basin, at a depth of 16 miles, hit the Changning County of Yibin. Several aftershocks with a magnitude of 5.0 continued in the following three days. The Changning earthquake sequence left at least 13 people killed, 6,200 others injured and 50,000 houses collapsed or damaged, and the direct economic loss was approximately 8.889 billion yuan (Wang, Chen, Jiang, Ma, & Qu, Reference Wang, Chen, Jiang, Ma and Qu2020). This disaster stirred a national concern. Entering the Chinese key words Changning (长宁) and earthquake (地震) in the world’s biggest Chinese-language search engine (www.baidu.com) in January 2020 resulted in about 11 million hits. Guang’an is about 300 kilometers away from Yibin. The Yibin earthquake was unnoticed at Guang’an and there were no other earthquakes at Guang’an in the period since the Yibin earthquake. The study was conducted from July 3 through 12, 2019.
In order to qualify for participation, individuals were required to range from 18 years to 40 years in age.Footnote 1 Participants were also required to be literate, born, and living in the disaster-hit area (also living there when the earthquake occurred). These sample characteristics can undermine the possibility of self-selection to live in a chosen place. Since Yibin residents who were affected by the earthquake were relatively hard-to-reach populations, the researcher first recruited participants from Yibin after the earthquake. Subsequently, Guang’an residents who were closely matched with Yibin participants in terms of demographic variables were recruited.
Participants in the two recruitment sites shared many demographic variables such as age, gender, highest level of educational attainment, income, marital status, and monthly income (Table 1). All of them were native speakers of the Sichuan dialect of Mandarin. Adopting this ‘just minimal difference’ approach can significantly decrease the potential for as many confounders as possible while focusing on the key factor of disaster experience (also see Li & Cao, Reference Li and Cao2019a; Uskul et al., Reference Uskul, Kitayama and Nisbett2008). Participants received a monetary payment (10 yuan) as an incentive to participate in the study. All participants provided oral consent before study inclusion.
Table 1. Sample characteristics of participants in Study 1
2.1.2. Materials and procedure
In this study, a trained research assistant explained the instructions and tested each participant individually. First, a time diagram task, modeled after de la Fuente et al. (Reference de la Fuente, Santiago, Román, Dumitrache and Casasanto2014), was used to measure people’s implicit space–time mappings. In this test, participants were made to look at a picture in which there was a cartoon character named Li Hua, with two empty containers which were respectively placed in front of and behind him (seen from above; Figure 1). A view looking down at the picture can exclude the possibility that participants misunderstood the time diagram task as being arranged vertically since the up–down spatio-temporal metaphors in Mandarin may influence their time spatialization (Boroditsky, Reference Boroditsky2001).
Fig. 1. Time Diagram Task presented to participants.
Then, a cover story was presented to participants that Li Hua visited a friend who loved animals yesterday (昨天, zuo-tian) and will visit another friend who likes plants tomorrow (明天, ming-tian). It merits a mention that to exclude the influence of lexical cues on people’s temporal performance, the wordings of temporal expressions in the cover story did not contain any spatial metaphors. Finally, the participants were asked to write the Chinese character ‘动’ (for ‘animal’) in the container corresponding to the past visit and then to write the Chinese character ‘植’ (for ‘plant’) in the other container corresponding to the future visit. The order of the animal/plant preference and the order of yesterday/tomorrow were fully counterbalanced across subjects. This questionnaire has been widely used and shown to be valid for use with Chinese people in many published studies (Li & Cao, Reference Li and Cao2017, Reference Li and Cao2018, Reference Li and Cao2020b, Reference Li and Cao2021).
Finally, participants completed the Chinese version of the Temporal Focus Scale (Li & Cao, Reference Li and Cao2020a; Shipp, Edwards, & Lambert, Reference Shipp, Edwards and Lambert2009), which consisted of eight items divided across two dimensions: past events and future events (four items each). Sample items include “I think back to my earlier days” (past focus) and “I think about what my future has in store” (future focus). Respondents were asked to rate how well each statement describes their current feelings on a 7-point Likert scale (1 = not at all, 7 = extremely), with higher scores indicating stronger agreement. In other words, temporal focus is operationalized in terms of the degree of agreement with future-focused and past-focused statements. In this study, Cronbach’s α for the past dimensions was .81 for Yinbin participants and .89 for Guang’an participants. Meanwhile, Cronbach’s α for the future dimensions was .81 for Yinbin participants and .87 for Guang’an participants. This indicates that the Temporal Focus Scale has a high internal validity for Chinese people. At the end of the survey, participants responded to a series of demographic questions and were thanked for their participation.
2.2. results and discussion
Participants were debriefed about the true purpose of the study. Debriefing responses indicated that none of the participants guessed the links between temporal focus and time spatialization. Thus, no data were discarded from the formal analyses. All analyses were conducted using IBM SPSS Statistics 25. All data have been made publicly available via Open Science Framework and can be accessed at <https://osf.io/ef5vc/>. The sagittal mental space–time mappings reversed between residents in the disaster-hit area and those in the non-disaster area, as revealed by a binary logistic regression (Wald χ2(1, N = 240) = 14.23, p < .001, odds ratio = 2.75, 95% confidence interval (CI) = [1.627, 4.659]). The majority of Yibin residents (77 vs. 38, 67.0%) adhered to the past-in-front pattern, writing the Chinese character corresponding to the past event in the empty box ahead of the cartoon character and the Chinese character corresponding to the future event in the empty box behind him (z = 3.64, p = .0002). In Guang’an residents, a reversed pattern which did not reach statistical significance was found. Just over half participants (72 vs. 53, 57.6%) placed the entities representing the future in front of the character and the past behind him (z = 1.70, p = .09). This pattern of results is comparable with that of Gu et al. (Reference Gu, Zheng and Swerts2019) in two aspects. On the one hand, Gu et al. found that Chinese people made a balanced use of past-in-front/future-at-back gestures (49.04%) and past-at-back/future-in-front gestures (50.96%). On the other hand, they found that Chinese speakers only exhibited only a marginal difference between past-in-front/future-at-back mappings and future-in-front/past-at-back (36.8% vs. 53.2%, p = .07) in the neutral condition of the time diagram task (the wordings of temporal expressions containing no spatial features). Overall, these findings suggest that Chinese speakers showed no significant preference between the two space–time mappings in the neutral context.
I additionally examined whether temporal-focus attention differed significantly between these two groups. Mixed design analyses of variance (ANOVA), with group (Yibin residents vs. Guang’an residents) as a between-subjects variable and temporal focus (past vs. future) as a within-subjects variable, were used to detect significant overall effects. The results showed that the interaction of temporal focus and group was significant (F(1, 238) = 14.37, p < .001, ηp2 = .06) (Figure 2). Follow-up analyses showed that Yibin residents showed higher agreement on past-oriented items than Guang’an participants (t (238) = 3.57, p < .001, d = 0.47), and Guang’an residents showed higher agreement on future-oriented items than Yibin participants (t (238) = 2.07, p = .039, d = 0.27).
Fig. 2. Results of Study 1: mean agreement with past- and future-oriented statements on the Temporal Focus Scale, separately for Yibin and Guang’an. Error bars show standard errors of the mean.
Taken together, the results of the time diagram task and Temporal Focus Scale suggest that the front–back mapping of time and temporal-focus attention differed significantly between residents living in the disaster and non-disaster areas. In addition, participants tended to conceptualize time according to their attention devoted to the past and the future. Thus, these findings provided initial demonstrations that disaster experience underpinning temporal focus is associated with people’s time spatialization, consistent with the TFH.
3. Study 2
In Study 1, it was found that residents in the earthquake-devastated area, who were more past-focused, showed a greater preference for mapping past events onto a frontal position than residents in the non-disaster area. Even though the ‘just minimal difference” approach was adopted, one may argue that the preference for past-in-front mapping in disaster-hit areas might only reflect mere differences in the location where the study took place rather than the disaster per se. To rule out the possibility that location is the basis accounting for the observed effects, follow-up surveys were conducted 10 months after the earthquake. Specifically, in Study 2, it was hypothesized that, with time ticking away, Yibin residents would show a similar pattern as Guang’an residents in temporal focus and time spatialization since the effects of the earthquake may diminish over time.
3.1. method
3.1.1. Participants
The recruitment criteria of Study 2 were identical to those of Study 1. Using the popular social platforms (e.g., QQ, Wechat, Weibo) in China, 114 Yibin residents and 120 Guang’an residents were recruited to complete the study in person. Participants in the two groups did not differ from each other in terms of many demographic variables such as age, sex, educational qualifications, civil status, and monthly income (Table 2).
Table 2. Sample characteristics of participants in Study 2
3.1.2. Materials and procedure
The study was conducted from April 20 through 30, 2020. The same time diagram task and the Temporal Focus Scale were employed to test time spatialization and temporal-focus attention, respectively, as in Study 1. In this study, Cronbach’s α for the past dimensions was .86 for Yinbin participants and .89 for Guang’an participants. Meanwhile, Cronbach’s α for the future dimensions was .88 for Yinbin participants and .92 for Guang’an participants. This indicates that the Temporal Focus Scale has a high internal validity in Chinese people. At the end of the survey, participants responded to a series of demographic questions and were thanked for their participation.
3.2. results and discussion
Participants were debriefed about the true purpose of the study. Debriefing responses indicated that none of the participants were aware of it and thus no data were discarded from the formal analyses. All analyses were conducted using IBM SPSS Statistics 25. The sagittal mental space–time mappings did not differ significantly between residents in the disaster-hit area and those in the non-disaster area, as revealed by a binary logistic regression (Wald χ2(1, N = 234) = .084, p = .77, odds ratio = 1.08, 95% confidence interval (CI) = [0.645, 1.804]). About half of Yibin residents (52 vs. 62, 45.6%) adhered to the past-in-front pattern, writing the Chinese character corresponding to the past event in the empty box ahead of the cartoon character, and the character corresponding to the future event in the empty box behind him (z = 0.94, p = .35). Similarly, about half of Guang’an participants (63 vs. 57, 52.5%) placed the entities representing the future in front of the character and the past behind him (z = 0.54, p = .58).
I additionally examined whether temporal-focus attention differed significantly between these two groups. Mixed design analyses of variance (ANOVA), with group (Yibin residents vs. Guang’an residents) as a between-subjects variable and temporal focus (past vs. future) as a within-subjects variable, were used to detect significant overall effects. The results showed that the interaction of temporal focus and group was not significant (F(1, 232) = 0.03, p = .86) (Figure 3). Follow-up analyses showed that Yibin and Guang’an residents showed equally high agreement on both past-oriented items (t (232) = 0.55, p = .58, d = 0.08) and future-oriented items (t (232) = 0.29, p = .77, d = 0.04).
Fig. 3. Results of Study 2: mean agreement with past- and future-oriented statements on the Temporal Focus Scale, separately for Yibin and Guang’an. Error bars show standard errors of the mean.
To provide a combined view on the findings from Study 1 and Study 2, the responses of the two waves of Yibin participants were compared. The sagittal mental space–time mappings reversed between these two groups, as revealed by a binary logistic regression (Wald χ2(1, N = 229) = 10.42, p = .001, odds ratio = 0.41, 95% confidence interval (CI) = [0.242, 0.707]). An additionally conducted mixed design analyses of variance (ANOVA) was conducted to examine whether temporal-focus attention differed significantly between these two groups. The results showed that the interaction of temporal focus and group was significant (F(1, 227) = 12.13, p = .001, ηp2 = .05). Follow-up analyses were performed to compare the difference between past- and future-focused statements in each group. It was found that the first wave of Yibin residents showed higher agreement on past-oriented items than the second wave of Yibin participants (t (227) = 2.25, p = .025, d = 0.32), and the second wave of Yibin participants showed higher agreement on future-oriented items than the first wave of Yibin residents (t (227) = 2.98, p = .003, d = 0.40).
Finally, I examined a relationship between individuals’ responses on the Temporal Focus Scale and their responses on the time diagram task by corroborating the results of Studies 1 and 2. In line with de la Fuente et al. (Reference de la Fuente, Santiago, Román, Dumitrache and Casasanto2014), a temporal focus index (TFI) was created to examine this question by using all of their responses from the Temporal Focus Scale: TFI = (mean of future-focused statements − mean of past-focused statements) / (mean of future-focused statements + mean of past-focused statements). The statistical analysis showed that the TFIs were a positive and significant predictor of participants’ time spatialization (Wald (df = 1) = 47.53, p < .001, odds ratio = 50.28 (95% confidence interval [CI]= 16.510, 153.142)). Lower TFIs were linked to a higher likelihood of past-in-front responses, and higher TFIs to a higher likelihood of future -in-front responses, supporting the TFH.
In sum, these findings suggest that geographical locations cannot account for the differences in implicit space–time mappings observed in Study 1. A more plausible explanation is that the past-focused orientation and past-in-front responses were more likely attributed to the disaster experience since the influence of disasters on time spatialization and temporal focus decayed over time in Study 2.
4. Discussion
Disaster experience exerts an important influence on people’s temporal orientation (Holman & Silver, Reference Holman and Silver1998). Though scholarly thought has focused on whether traumatic events can induce past-oriented thinking across a variety of tasks and PTSD populations (Blix & Brennen, Reference Blix and Brennen2011; Lavi & Solomon, Reference Lavi and Solomon2005), recent perspectives suggest that environmental forces such as living environment and pathogen threat may also shape implicit space–time mappings (Li & Cao, Reference Li and Cao2017, Reference Li and Cao2021). The present research joins this burgeoning literature and demonstrate that people’s attentional focus on time and spatial conceptions of time varied as the impact of earthquake decays over time. Study 1 found that, compared with participants in a non-disaster area, participants in the earthquake-hit area were more likely to be past-focused and to map the past to their front. However, Study 2 showed that the strength of the past-in-front mapping bias was weakened with time ticking away (10 months after the earthquake). Taken together, these studies suggest that a recent traumatic experience is associated with a higher degree of past focus and a higher likelihood of producing past-in-front mapping responses.
This paper makes several theoretical contributions. First, the present findings add to work on conceptualizations of time by introducing a new factor, disaster experience, that can predict the mapping of time onto space. Building on the TFH, temporal focus is identified as the underlying mechanism, thereby adding to the ongoing investigation of cognitive processes that can influence spatial representations of time. Much of what we know about humans’ spatial conceptions of time is based on research conducted in times of relative security. However, little research has been conducted on the mental mappings between space and time when an individual is affected by natural disasters. The current study aimed to fill this significant gap by investigating the temporal focus and time spatialization of residents who were affected by earthquakes.
According to previous research, traumatized individuals focus more attention on their past events (Holman & Silver, Reference Holman and Silver1998). In combination with insights into the TFH, this suggests that people’s spatial representations of time are shaped by their temporal focus. Bridging these two lines of research, the current investigation found evidence that earthquake experience created initial changes in the increase of past-in-front responses, but the effect diminished 10 months later. Thus, this paper provided the first empirical evidence that environmental factors such as disaster experience can also be associated with people’s attention to the past and with a higher likelihood of producing the past-in-front mapping.
Second, the present findings enrich an emerging line of work that investigates the effects of environment on cognition (Lee & Schwarz, Reference Lee and Schwarz2020; Meier, Schnall, Schwarz, & Bargh, Reference Meier, Schnall, Schwarz and Bargh2012). When examining the psychological consequences of natural disasters, researchers have typically focused on psychiatric disorders, emotional distress, and mental health problems (Lai et al., Reference Lai, Ma, Wang, Cai, Hu, Wei and Tan2020; Norris, Friedman, & Watson, Reference Norris, Friedman and Watson2002). The present research examined the novel possibility that environmental features of devastating earthquakes can be linked to the mental relationship between space and time. These findings are in line with the literature on environment and embodied cognition, which have begun to converge only in the past decade. For instance, holding a warm vs. cold mug of coffee momentarily increases feelings of interpersonal warmth (Williams & Bargh, Reference Williams and Bargh2008), completing a questionnaire at a tilt table results in a less severe moral judgment (Li & Cao, Reference Li and Cao2019b), and the darkness of a room evokes people’s feelings about a dim future in finding a satisfactory job (Dong, Huang, & Zhong, Reference Dong, Huang and Zhong2015).
These findings provided supporting evidence for the psychological correspondence between concrete concepts (e.g., physical warmth) and their abstract counterparts (e.g., a warm welcome) directly. According to embodied cognition theories, higher mental processes (e.g., goal pursuits, judgments, and actions) are grounded in early experience of the physical environment (Williams, Huang, & Bargh, Reference Williams, Huang and Bargh2009). For instance, internal physical states (e.g., bodily warmth) play a role in activating the scaffolded abstract concept (e.g., emotional warmth) and produce metaphor-consistent effects on individuals’ perception. Thus, these findings fit well with the Conceptual Metaphor Theory, which states that metaphorically related cognitions or perceptions are often represented using concrete constructs and physical experiences (Lakoff & Johnson, Reference Lakoff and Johnson1980). Yet there is no direct relationship between disaster experience and space–time mappings. This finding suggests that a seemingly unrelated environmental situation can also bring about changes even when the two concepts have no direct experiential link.
Finally, the present research provided evidence for the malleability and flexibility of temporal focus. The findings indicated that individuals who were affected by the earthquake tended to ruminate about their experience, since they showed a stronger agreement with past-focused statements. However, individuals, with time ticking away, tended to maintain a more prominent future orientation. This is possibly because future orientation is positively related to people’s physical and mental health. For instance, Zhang et al. (Reference Zhang, Zhao, Li, Hong, Fang, Barnett and Zhang2009) found that future orientation plays a mediating role in the relationship between traumatic events and mental well-being among children affected by HIV/AIDS in rural China. Thus, it would be valuable to investigate whether characteristically thinking about the future can counteract psychological distress among residents affected by the earthquake in future research.
This is also parallel to previous findings that threats and crises such as disaster experience play a vital role in shaping people’s temporal focus (Levasseur, Shipp, Fried, Rousseau, & Zimbardo, Reference Levasseur, Shipp, Fried, Rousseau and Zimbardo2020; Li & Cao, Reference Li and Cao2021). Despite temporal focus referring to the relatively stable personality tendency that individuals cognitively engage with time, research on how people devote their attention to different time frames in a specific context due to highly salient situational cues is gaining momentum in the literature (Shipp & Aeon, Reference Shipp and Aeon2019). For instance, Holman, Silver, Mogle, and Scott (Reference Holman, Silver, Mogle and Scott2016) found that the 9/11 terrorist attacks induced a shift in present-focused thinking at the initial stage and engendered a strong past focus that persisted a year later. These findings suggest that temporal focus is likely to be flexibly altered in response to the challenging effects of disaster experience on different time scales. Note that the results by Holman and her colleagues seem to contrast with the present findings since earthquake-hit individuals became less past-focused as time elapsed. One possible reason for the discrepancy is that 9/11 terrorist attacks produced a more persistent influence on individuals’ mental and physical health than did Yibin earthquake. For instance, Jordan et al. (Reference Jordan, Osahan, Li, Stein, Friedman, Brackbill and Farfel2019) found that about half of participants reported having developed at least one of the physical or mental health conditions even fifteen years after the terrorist attacks. However, the Yibin earthquake caused comparably only little damage to local areas and may not alter temporal focus a year later.
The current studies also provide several avenues for future research. First, the participants for these studies, although sampling a broad cross-section of society, were only composed of Chinese people. It is unclear whether these findings can be generalized to other cultural communities since metaphors shape the particularities of human experiences (Gibbs, Reference Gibbs2020). One prominent characteristic of Chinese speakers is their lack of default bias toward the past- and future-in-front mappings (Gu et al., Reference Gu, Zheng and Swerts2019). It therefore would be worth exploring whether – and if so, how – results differ among a sample that has a strong bias for the past- or future-in-front mapping. For instance, de la Fuente et al. (Reference de la Fuente, Santiago, Román, Dumitrache and Casasanto2014) found that Moroccans demonstrate a great preference for the past-in-front mappings. It is unclear whether earthquake experience can promote a further increase in the (already high) rate of past-in-front responses. Additionally, instead of using the space in front of and behind the body, the time diagram task requires participants to take on the perspective of the cartoon character. In this design, the deictic center is transported from the participants’ own bodies to a location in the external world and thus may reflect a different spatial construal of time than internal deictic time. Therefore, future research using a body-centered sagittal axis to investigate implicit space–time mappings would be valuable.
Second, the present study is only the starting point of investigating the behavioral associations between traumatic experience and spatial conceptions of time. Since the current research is likely but a first datapoint in this exploration, it is necessary and worthwhile to engage in more longitudinal or even experimental research that can explain the causality behind the observed relationships. In addition, the present research did not examine present focus and thus it remains unknown whether people in different areas vary in their attention to the present. Previous research has shown that traumatized individuals may engender a stronger present focus (Holman et al., Reference Holman, Silver, Mogle and Scott2016). Thus, it would be valuable to investigate the association between present focus and implicit space–time mappings in future studies. Insights from such research may help to get a better understanding on the conceptualization of time.
Finally, the current inquiry only investigated the relationship between temporal focus and time spatialization in the context of disaster with an acute onset (e.g., earthquake). It is still an open question whether chronic forms of trauma have the same effect on people’s spatial conceptions of time. In addition, recency is another feature of disaster experience. The Yibin earthquake is a recent experience for participants in the study, while other experience such as Three Years of Natural Disasters (1960–1962) in China had objectively ended many years ago. It would be valuable to investigate whether different forms of disaster produced similar changes in people’s conceptualizations of time.
