Explorations were hampered on the association between the decrease in self-continuity (i.e., feeling less connected with one’s more distant past and future selves) and temporal discounting (i.e., the tendency to devalue delayed outcomes) due to methodological limitations.

Social discounting describes the tendency to show less generosity to the more socially distant recipient. With respect to age differences, prior studies (Pornpattananangkul et al., 2019; Lin & Zhang, 2020) found that older adults showed more generosity to distant others (i.

Recent findings revealed systematic temporal patterns of past and future self-continuity (Lu et al., 2023) that differ meaningfully across individuals and appear to be susceptible to major life changes. To date, however, the association between structural aspects of temporal self-continuity and longitudinal health trajectories remains unexplored.

The present study examined whether the average levels and the temporal extension of self-continuity varied over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. Three demographically matched adult life-span samples (n = 223 each) were gathered in the U.

This study examined the robustness of previously reported age differences in self-continuity in two adult life-span samples collected in Germany and the U.S. Consistent with the prior literature (for a review see Löckenhoff & Rutt, 2016) average self-continuity was positively associated with chronological age (H1).