ABSTRACT
The temporal agency to refer to the manner in which people linguistically assign the capacity for action and change in the passage of time. This chapter outlines socio-emotional selectivity theory and explains how the motivational mechanisms posited by this theory might manifest themselves in spontaneous discourse about future events. The influence of linguistic context on temporal thinking is paralleled by spatial context effects documented by Boroditsky and Ramscar, who posed the aforementioned proposition about rescheduling a meeting to people in a variety of situations involving physical movement. Perspectives on aging describe other cognitive changes, such as a reorientation toward emotion-centered goals rather than achievement goals and reassessment of goal achievement strategies from achievement and growth to maintenance and avoidance. McGlone and Harding observed that when temporal sentences were presented with other sentences that ascribed agency to either humans or events, comprehension of whether the meeting had been moved closer or further in time was influenced.
