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According to a paper to be published in Psychological Science this has an interesting psychological effect. A group of researchers, led by Eugene Caruso of the University of Chicago, found that people judge the distance of events 36 , depending on whether they are in the past or future. The paper calls this the "Temporal Doppler Effect". In physics, the Doppler effect describes the way that waves change frequency depending on whether their 37 is travelling towards or away from you. Mr. Caruso argues that something similar happens with people's perception of time. Because future events are associated with diminishing distance, while those in the past are thought of as 38 , something happening in one month feels psychologically 39 than something that happened a month ago.
This idea was tested in a series of experiments. In one, researchers asked 323 40 and divided them into two groups. A week before Valentine's day, members of the first were asked how they planned to celebrate it. A week after February 14th the second group reported how they had celebrated it. Both groups also had to describe how near the day felt on a 41 of one to seven. Those describing forthcoming plans-were more likely to report it as feeling "a short time from now", while those who had already 42 it tended to cluster at the "a long time from now" end of the scale. To account for the risk that recalling actual events requires different cognitive functions than imagining ones that have not yet happened, they also asked participants to 43 the distance of hypothetical events a month in the past or future. The asymmetry (不對稱) remained.
Mr. Caruso speculates that his research has 44 for psychological well-being. He suspects that people who do not show this bias-those who feel the past as being closer-might be more 45 to rumination( 沉思)or depression ,because they are more likely to dwell on past events.
