Times of Life and Timing in Developmental Psychology

Abstract

For the many aspects of psychological time, there are many approaches to understanding, including cultural theories, psychological studies, philosophical analyses and mathematical models. A useful approach is to assume that there are many kinds of psychological time in coexistence, and to distinguish their different cultural and meaning-based contexts, as do Yamada and Kato (2006). From a different perspective, Rudolph (2006) presents rigorous mathematical models of psychological time, in the hope that psychologists will apply them as ways to gain insights into experience and change. This discussion enjoins some qualities of time, attention and ambivalence (Rudolph’s themes) to properties of dialectical structures (Hood, 1995), with fluctuation as a source of individuality within the spiraling cycles of reversible time proposed by Yamada and Kato. Fluctuations at a border, especially a fractal border, may show the way in which a present experience contains traces of the past and constructions of the future. Applications of mathematical models in cultural contexts serve here to more fully elaborate the qualities of psychological time, rather than to reduce them as statistical products. This approach suggests a reconsideration of the distinctive roles of different kinds of time in the study of life cycles.