Being Here and Now: The Benefits of Belonging in Space and Time
- PDF / 941,410 Bytes
- 25 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 74 Downloads / 163 Views
Being Here and Now: The Benefits of Belonging in Space and Time Matthew Baldwin1 · Lucas A. Keefer2
© Springer Nature B.V. 2019
Abstract Research suggests that a sense of belonging is a critical prerequisite of happiness and wellbeing. While some have focused on belonging provided by relationships, other work demonstrates the value of belonging in certain places. In the current research we join these efforts to understand belonging by offering a novel framework for exploring an understudied but no less fundamental aspect of human experience—time. We situate this framework within an existential analysis of human action and test general predictions about the psychological value of experiencing a sense of belonging in time, what we call temporal rootedness. Two samples (Studies 1 and 2) collected across cultures provide converging evidence that temporal rootedness is a unique psychological phenomenon that is predictive of personal psychological well-being. Two additional experiments (Studies 3 and 4) offer promising evidence that temporal rootedness can be situationally induced and threatened with consequences for well-being. These findings demonstrate the potential value of further exploration into this sense of belonging. Keywords Time · Temporal self · Well-being · Belonging · Scale development · Quantitative methods I often wonder if I should have been born at another time…. If I had just been born when it was a little quieter out there, would I have even become an addict in the first place? Might I have been more focused? A more fully realized person? —Sherlock Holmes, Elementary, Season 2 Episode 7 Although psychologists often agree that “context” is important, there are considerable differences in how people define the environment. For some “context” refers to broad cultural environments shaped by shared norms (Shweder 1991), for others it is immediate physical surroundings (Gibson 1978), or the total collection of people and objects influencing the individual (Latour 2005).
* Matthew Baldwin [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, University of Florida, Room 524 McCarty Hall C, Gainesville, FL 32603, USA
2
Department of Psychology, University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg, MS, USA
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
M. Baldwin, L. A. Keefer
What these and other senses of “context” commonly share is an emphasis on the social and the spatial, a focus we believe has had the undesirable consequence of neglecting the temporal. Just as human agents inhabit physical, social, and cultural spaces with unique psychological affordances, they also inhabit immediate and extended times, including days, seasons, and even generations (Lewin 1936). While this is unlikely an eye-opening claim on its own, it points to a lacuna in research on how humans relate to temporal positions and whether these ways of relating differ meaningfully from orientations toward other contexts. In the current paper, we focus specifically on the experience of rootedness, a sense of belonging and attachment associated with being in a
Data Loading...
