Pace of Life and Enjoyment of Life

The paper addresses the paradox that people in modern societies believe themselves to be very happy and satisfied with their lives while simultaneously are subjected to increasing time pressure and pace of life. It starts with presenting evidence for time pressure covering objective and subjective indicators. Evidence for Germany is given by comparing time-budgets in 1991/92 and in 1999. Time use among full time employed in Germany and other EU-societies in the 1990s is compared to the US and Japan by means of diary-data. As regards work life, overwork and the gap between actual and preferred working hours are examined. Survey-results on the relationship between work load, time pressure, stress and health are reported.Most of these data support the conclusion that time pressure has emerged as a major social problem. Hence citizens are beginning to consider time prosperity as a dimension of their well-being beyond their consumer wealth.However, this growing pace of life does not reduce life satisfaction and happiness. Here a paradox evolves as increasing time pressure goes hand in hand with increased subjective well-being (SWB) at country level in cross-cultural comparison as well as at individual level.In the third section some answers to this paradox are explored: A first answer is offered through the modernization theory: life satisfaction and QOL are proliferating along with economic growth and living standards. This process at the same time accelerates social life. Hence, the negative effects of time pressure are counterbalanced by various yields of the modernization process resulting in a pattern of "heavy-going" satisfaction.A second explanation is the psychological approach: time pressure fulfils positive functions for mobilizing individual resources. A variation of this argument is that the multiple-choice-society offers a wide variety of attractive options resulting in people engaging in too many activities. Here, the enjoyment of life is equated with taking advantage of every opportunity.However, this paper prefers a third approach based on Simmel's explanation of the ambivalent consequences of modernity. Even where the majority of citizens report high levels of happiness and life satisfaction – which can be explained through "arousal" or "eu-stress" – the need to ease the time-burden of disadvantaged groups and to down-speed work and social life in general is essential.     

Pace alteration and estimation of time intervals

This experiment examined the effects on participants' estimates of interval duration of altering the pace of auditory stimuli contained within "filled" intervals. Because most previous studies on the filled interval effect have utilized visual displays, auditory stimuli were used to assess whether the effect would be present. In addition, previous studies compared two intervals, one of which was filled and the other unfilled. In the present study, both intervals were filled with tones at one of three rates (or "paces"): slow, medium, or fast. 25 participants (20 women) ages 18 to 29 years (M = 20.4, SD = 2.3) were recruited from psychology courses and programs. Participants first heard a "training" interval filled with tones at one of the three paces and then attempted to reproduce the duration of that training interval in the "test" interval. The pace of stimuli in each pair of training and test intervals was varied so participants received all possible combinations of paces of auditory stimuli during the training and test trial sets. Analysis showed that, when training pace was fast and test pace was medium or slow, participants' estimates were longer than the actual test interval durations. Conversely, when training pace was slow and test pace was medium or fast, participants' estimates were shorter than actual test interval durations. In addition, when judging shorter intervals, participants estimated more time had passed than actually had, while they estimated that less time had passed than actually had for longer intervals, thus providing support for Vierordt's law.     

Accuracy of Pace Count as a Distance Estimation Procedure

The purpose of this study was to assess the accuracy of pace counting under varying conditions and to resolve discrepancies between U.S. Army Field Manual 21-26 (FM 21-26; Department of the Army, 1987) and pace-counting research conducted by Powers (1964). Two experiments were designed to measure accuracy of distance estimations from pace counting on-road and off-road under conditions of daylight and darkness. In both experiments, male soldiers enrolled in One Station Unit Training (OSUT) were trained to estimate distances based on pace counts performed on a flat road during daylight. In Experiment 1, the soldiers were tested on a flat road during both daylight and darkness; in Experiment 2, soldiers were tested off-road on hilly terrain during both daylight and darkness. The general finding in both experiments was that soldiers tended to underestimate distance during day- light and to overestimate distance during darkness. These errors became greater as the test conditions became less like the training condition. It was concluded that pace count should be adjusted, as indicated by FM 21-26, either by opportunities for more training time or by standard pace-count adjustment formulas. Also, because of inherent inaccuracies, pace count should be used as a backup and/or in conjunction with other land navigation techniques.     

Edward Bordin: Fusing Work and Play

This article contains highlights of an interview with Edward Bordin, who later died on August 24, 1992, after a long battle with prostate cancer. It focuses both on his professional history and contributions to the field as well as on his personal life. We were honored to learn from his wife Ruth that portions of the material that follows were read at his funeral service.