The most frequently used measure of time perspective is the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory (ZTPI, Zimbardo and Boyd, 1999). ZTPI include five subscales, two that concern the past, two that involve the present, and one scale that targets the future. Past Positive reflects a warm and nostalgic view of the past (e.g., Familiar childhood sights, sounds, and smells often bring back a flood of wonderful memories), whereas Past Negative reflects an aversive view towards the past (e.g., I think about the bad things that have happened to me in the past). Present Hedonistic captures a live-for-the-moment attitude toward the present with little concern for the future (e.g., I feel that it’s more important to enjoy what you are doing than to get work done on time), whereas Present Fatalistic reflects an attitude toward the present characterized by an external locus of control (e.g., Since whatever will be will be, it does not really matter what I do). Finally, Future involves an attitude and direction toward the future that involves planning and striving for rewards (e.g., When I want to achieve something, I set goals and consider specific means for reaching those goals). In analogy with the division of the past into positive and negative dimensions, Carelli et al. (2011) expanded the original scale to include separate Future Positive and Future Negative subscales. Future Positive is basically the same as the original Future scale (except for one item), whereas the new Future Negative scale captures an aversive attitude to the future (e.g., To think of the future makes me sad). The distinction between positive and negative future dimensions was supported by several findings. For example, scores on Future Negative, but not Future Positive, were associated with maladaptive coping strategies like substance use and denial in teenagers (Blomgren et al., 2016), and levels of stress were strongly associated with Future Negative but unrelated to Future Positive (Rönnlund et al., 2018).

A basic tenet of the time perspective theory by Zimbardo and Boyd (1999, 2008) is that individuals often develop temporal biases in the form of an overfocus on a particular temporal frame or attitude (e.g., on negative aspects of the past). These biases act as a disposition that exerts an enduring influence on thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, and such time perspective biases are predictive of various kinds of behavioral problems and forms of ill-health. By contrast, the balanced time perspective (BTP) was proposed as an ideal time perspective that involves the ability to adaptively switch between temporal frames depending on situational factors and should be associated with high levels of wellbeing. BTP was thought to concur with a ZTPI score profile characterized by high scores on Past Positive, low scores on Past Negative and Present Fatalistic, a moderate score on Present Hedonistic, and a moderately high score on Future (Zimbardo and Boyd, 2008). Based on this idea, a measure known as Deviations from the Balanced Time Perspective (DBTP) was developed to measure an individuals’ distances to the BTP-profile, taking all five (Stolarski et al., 2011) or six (Rönnlund et al., 2017) ZTPI dimensions into account. This measure has now been considered in many recent studies indicating that the notion of BTP is a vital mechanism of adaption in different areas of functioning (see Stolarski et al., 2020 for a review).

Another important function for the understanding of our sense of self is mentalization. Mentalization is defined as the capacity to interpret self and others in terms of internal mental states such as wishes, feelings, intentions, and desires (Fonagy et al., 2016), often described as “the ability to see others from the inside and ourselves from the outside” (Bateman and Fonagy, 2016).

Mentalization is considered to be organized around four dimensions or polarities (Luyten et al., 2020): automatic vs. controlled mentalization (e.g., mentalizing either occurs automatically without conscious effort or is controlled by making conscious decisions to reflect on a given situation), inner vs. outer mentalization (e.g., reflection on either inner states such as emotions or thoughts, or outer states such as visible actions and behaviors), self vs. others (e.g., reflection on either one’s own feelings or thoughts, or other people’s feelings and thoughts), and cognitive vs. affective mentalization (e.g., reflection on either cognitive or emotional content).

Whereas good mentalization capabilities are linked to favorable outcomes, poor mentalization has been linked to poorer life satisfaction and a range of psychological disorders such as borderline personality disorder (Perroud et al., 2017), depression (Fischer-Kern and Tmej, 2019), anxiety disorders (Sloover et al., 2022), schizophrenia (Chung et al., 2014), and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD; Perroud et al., 2017).

Interestingly, similar associations were observed for time perspective biases, such that greater deviations from optimal values on specific ZTPI facets and/or greater DBTP scores compared with healthy participants, were observed in individuals with anxiety disorders (Åström et al., 2019), major depressive disorder (Pyszkowska et al., 2024), schizophrenia (Styła et al., 2019), and ADHD (Carelli and Wiberg, 2012). A significant negative association of DBTP and life satisfaction was furthermore reported in several studies (e.g., Stolarski et al., 2016, 2020; Rönnlund et al., 2017).

One basis for expecting mentalization capabilities to covary with time perspective are common roots in attachment processes and early social development. In developmental models of mentalization (Luyten et al., 2020), interactions with primary caregivers are considered one essential factor. More specifically, parents with better capabilities for mentalization are more likely sensitive to their child’s needs, promoting secure attachment and epistemic trust. This increases chances of developing mentalizing capabilities further via social learning, a virtuous circle that may increase resilience to adversity and stress. One could speculate that forming a more balanced time perspective, which is related to lower stress (e.g., Papastamatelou et al., 2015; Rönnlund et al., 2018) is part of this process, as temporal perspective is an inherent part actions and events involving self and others. Conversely, once established, time biases could potentially hinder mentalization processes. For example, individuals with a marked bias toward negative aspects of the past might project past experiences onto present situations, and to show less flexibility in adapting to new information in changing social dynamics, leading to misunderstandings or misinterpretations of others’ intentions or emotions.

In any case, there is evidence based on children and adolescents that secure attachment is associated with better capabilities for mentalization, whereas forms of insecure attachment are associated with difficulties in this regard (for a review, see Luyten et al., 2020). Also, consistent with the notion that attachment to parents/caregivers are an essential factor for time perspective (e.g., Akirmak, 2014), several studies show that stronger attachment to parents in adolescence is associated with higher scores on the positively valenced facets of ZTPI, and lower scores on Past Negative, Future Negative as well as Present Fatalistic (e.g., Blomgren et al., 2016; Laghi et al., 2016). By contrast, maladaptive attachment styles involving anxiety and avoidance in romantic relationships were associated with greater DBTP scores (Akirmak, 2014).

Mentalization capabilities were moreover shown to have a positive relation to the personality trait agreeableness (Allen et al., 2017), whereas higher DBTP was negatively associated with this trait (Bajec, 2018). Prosocial behaviors usually predominant in agreeableness personality trait is theorized to be promoted by a secure attachment, since secure relationships create an optimal environment for the development of emotional understanding (Costa et al., 2022). Thus, based on evidence of common links to attachment, and the idea that mentalization and time perspective could reinforce one another, one might expect that difficulties with mentalization are associated with greater deviations from the balanced time perspective.

So far, only one prior study that we know of (Wu et al., 2022), examined the association of measures mentalization and time perspective. The focus of the study was on evaluating the validity of the self-report questionnaire for mentalization they had developed rather than to examine these associations specifically, and the only hypothesis stated was that scores on Future might be expected to be associated with genuine mentalization. Their measure of mentalization (IMQ) contained two subscales related to mentalization. The first subscale (IMQ_SO) was intended to capture mentalization of others’ mental states from the perspective of the self, whereas the second subscale (IMQ_SS) aimed to capture the self-generated mental states from the perspective of the self. A third scale was developed to assess mentalization of own mental state from viewpoint of others, which they labeled as a “meta-metacognitive” aspect.

Focusing on the first two scales, tapping aspects usually regarded as part of the mentalization construct, the self-self (meta-cognition) scale showed results that were in line with the hypothesis outlined above, namely a significant positive correlation with Future in two separate samples (mean r = 0.33). Past Positive was in addition significantly associated with mentalization in both samples (mean r = 0.25). Finally, mentalization ability showed a significant negative association with Present Fatalistic, in one of the samples at least. The results for the second (self-to-others) scale showed a different pattern. In the latter case, greater scores on both ZTPI dimensions involving present time frame (Present Fatalistic, and also Present Hedonistic) were namely related to better perceived ability to judge other’s mental states, and also this scale was unrelated to scores on Future. Thus, part of the results by Wu et al. (2022) were consistent with the expectations that good mentalization ability should be paired with a more “BTP like” ZTPI score profile, for example lower score on Present Fatalistic and higher scores on Future, while other aspects of the results seem inconsistent with this prediction.

Given the sparse evidence on the relation of time perspective and mentalization and the somewhat mixed results in Wu et al. (2022), we deemed a conceptual replication study motivated. We expanded on the prior study by adopting the six-factor version of the Zimbardo Time Perspective inventory (Carelli et al., 2011). Given that the new Future Negative scale was shown to be associated with anxiety, depression, and lower life satisfaction, we expected this scale to be related to lower levels of mentalization (hypomentalization). Finally, in addition to subscale analyses by Wu et al., we considered the DPBT measure described above. Under the assumption that this provides the best single measure of deviations from the healthy balanced profile we expected that this measure would show a particularly strong relationship with mentalization.

As a measure of mentalization we chose the Reflective Functioning Questionnaire (RFQ-8) by Fonagy et al. (2016). RFQ-8 is a widely used measure that showed good levels of internal consistency and was able to discriminate, for example, individuals with ADHD or borderline personality disorder from a healthy control group (Perroud et al., 2017). However, several recent studies (e.g., Müller et al., 2022; Woźniak-Prus et al., 2022; Horváth et al., 2023) questioned the validity of separate scales for certainty (hypermentalization; i.e. a tendency to make assumption that go beyond what is reasonable, i.e., feeling of knowing exactly what others think) vs. uncertainty (hypomentalization; i.e. an incapability, or reluctance, to think in nuanced perspectives about mental state of others, i.e., making interpretations in concrete and superficially observable ways) that were proposed by the developers. As noted by the authors of the latter articles, the fact that four out of the eight items are double coded and used as indicators both of hypo- and hypermentalization is problematic from viewpoint of the assumption of uncorrelated measurement errors. Also, scores on the hypermentalization scale, contrary to what would be expected from theory, were positively rather than negatively associated with indices of health in several of these studies. Finally, confirmatory factor analyses provided support of a unitary model. Given this matter, a first and necessary step in the current study was to identify a best fitting model for the version of RFQ-8 (in Swedish) that we used.

A total of 258 individuals took part in the study (192 women, 62 men, 4 “other,” M = 30.4 years, SD = 11.4). The sample was a convenience sample recruited using flyers at Umeå University, links to the web survey in student groups and via Facebook pages. A majority (n = 163) were students, 71 were full- or part time employed, 4 were unemployed, 4 were on parental leave, 5 were on sick leave, and 11 marked “other” as occupation. As of health care status, 196 participants stated having no ongoing contact with health care system for some sort of psychological issue, 60 participants stated having an ongoing contact with health care system for some sort of psychological issue, and 2 participants did not want to specify health care status. All participants provided informed consent before filling out the form.

The measures of mentalization and time perspective were part of a web survey that was created using Microsoft Forms. The survey additionally contained questions regarding sex, age, occupation, and whether the participant had an ongoing contact with the health care system, for any type of psychological condition at present moment, or not.

Statistical Analyses were conducted using IBM SPSS Statistics, SPSS AMOS version 29. For manifest variables Pearson’s correlations were computed. CFA/structural equation models were used to compare competing models of RFQ-8 and to examine correlations of latent (mentalization) and time perspective variables. At this point we used deviations calculated separately for the past, present, and future frames of the S-ZTPI as indicators of a common DBTP construct (Rönnlund and Carelli, 2018). For these analyses we considered three indices of model fit. The first was the chi-square denominator (x²/df) with a value below 2 being considered as good and a value below 3 acceptable. The second was Comparative Fit Index (CFI) for which a value of 0.95 or higher is desirable (Hu and Bentler, 1999), while 0.90 is often taken to indicate reasonable fit (e.g., Schumacker and Lomax, 2010). The third was the Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA). Values for RMSEA at or below 0.06 indicate good model fit (Hu and Bentler, 1999), while values between 0.06 and 0.08 indicate reasonable fit (Browne and Cudeck, 1993).

Despite strengths in form of use of well researched measures of the main constructs and attention to latent factors, the present study has limitations. Apart from the limitation of components of mentalization measured (e.g., little focus on mentalizing others), the sole use of questionnaires to assess the constructs may induce share method variance. At least for mentalization, behavioral approaches are available that might be considered in future studies.