Stress Management Summit

Biography

Biography: Yiqun Gan

Abstract

In a world full of changes and crises, future-oriented coping strategies are especially useful in stress management, enabling us effectively cope with challenges and sustain our well-being. Psychologists have made unique contributions to promote this type of stress management. Future-oriented coping is regarded as a positive mental quality associated with greater happiness, life satisfaction, and personal growth. In this talk, we broaden our understanding of future-oriented coping by proposing a sequential model of future-oriented coping. We demonstrated that for different future stressors in cross-sectional and longitudinal studies, wherein preventive coping occurs before proactive coping, is a better fit than a parallel model. Based on these findings, we proposed a sequential model of future-oriented coping, in which time discounting serves as an antecedent (Gan et al., 2011, 2012, 2013). We also explored the temporal correlates of future-oriented coping, using three research paradigms: delayed discounting, task prioritization, and time-interval perception. We found that people with high future-oriented coping were less susceptible to temporal discounting in delayed discounting tasks, making fewer irrational choices when prioritizing urgent and important tasks. Furthermore, under experimentally induced stress, the advantage of future-oriented coping was reversed. (Gan et al., in press). Using the time-interval perception paradigm, we found that people with high future-oriented coping located important future events as being nearer in a time axis. We concluded that future-oriented coping involves understanding temporal distance and accurately perceiving the importance of future events. Suggestions for future research inspired by this framework are also discussed. Biography Yiqun Gan is a professor at the Department of Psychology, Peking University, China. She has received her Ph.D. in the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1998. She has published over 80 research papers, among them 24 were on internationally referred journals (indexed by SCI/SSCI) as the first or corresponding author. She has been in charge of a number of research projects. She serves on the editorial board of "Applied Psychology: Health and Well-being " and is an ad-hoc reviewer for 25 international journals. Her research area focuses on coping, mental health, and job burnout.