Violation of time perspectives in a victim’s personality

The relevance of the study of time perspective as a phenomenon that can be conceptualized in different ways is caused by its critical role in perception and experience of life events, their meaning. Psychological time of a person unites all the reality structures as all life processes develop in a continuum. The specifics of perception of different (most commonly traumatic) life events by a victim person attract special emphasis. The growth of victimization is caused by the escalation of tensions of modern society with the mosaic structure of the ideas about the specifics of view of life. The paper covers the theoretical and empirical analysis of time perspectives violation and cognitive distortions of a victimized personality. The authors give characteristics of a personality time perspective as a multidimensional dynamic construct, describe its differentiation. The paper describes the role of cognitive distortions in the determination of victim behavior of a person. Based on a theoretical review, the authors formulated a hypothesis that a victim personality is characterized by the time perspective violations. An empirical sample group involved young male and female students and graduate students of Russian universities (N=165). The average age of tested people was 21.8 years (max=29, min=20). In the study, the authors used the following methods: O.O. Andronnikova’s Technique of the Research of Propensity to Victim Behavior; Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory; A. Beck and A. Weisman Dysfunctional Attitudes Scale, and A. Ellis Survey of Personal Beliefs. The empirical study identified the reliable interrelations between the victim behavior scales and time perspective parameters. A victim personality is characterized by a pessimistic attitude to the events in the past, fatalistic, helpless, and hopeless attitude to the present and the life on the whole, inability to develop time perspective of the future with the lack of ability to enjoy current events.