Examination on how emotion regulation mediates the relationship between future time perspective and well-being: a counter-evidence to the socioemotional selectivity theory.

Previous studies have shown that older people maintain higher well-being than younger people despite their physical and cognitive functioning declining with age. This paradoxical phenomenon has been explained by the socioemotional selectivity theory (SST), in which a limited future time perspective (FTP) is an antecedent that leads to higher well-being through the use of adaptive emotion regulation. However, few empirical studies have examined the mediation process assumed in the SST. Moreover, it is unclear whether time left in life (TLL), which was originally referred to in the SST and is thought to be a different concept from FTP, relates to emotion regulation and well-being. Therefore, the current study investigated how emotion regulation mediates the relationship between FTP, TLL, and well-being by using a cross-sectional questionnaire that was responded to by 1393 Japanese adults (age range 20-89 years,  = 54.23, SD = 19.01). The results of correlation and mediation analyses indicated that, in contrast to the assumption of the SST, limited (expanded) FTP and TLL generally lead to lower (higher) well-being through the mediation of maladaptive (adaptive) emotion regulation. Although there are some methodological limitations, the findings imply that the relationship between FTP, TLL, and emotion regulation that is assumed in the SST should be reconsidered and that TLL should be thought of as a distinct variable from FTP.