Procrastination and emotional upset: A typological model

The study investigated the personality profiles that emerge from dichotomizing subjects on two axes: (1) high vs low procrastination in handling the routines of daily living; and (2) high vs low manifest emotional upset experienced with reference to those routine tasks on which they, in fact, procrastinate. Anticipatory emotional upset was also investigated. It referred to the upset that would be experienced if subjects were to procrastinate on routine tasks that are, in fact, performed promptly and efficiently. The two kinds of emotional upset were found to be moderately intercorrelated and were weakly, if at all, correlated with procrastination. Profile analysis placed 99 of 164 Israeli engineering students in four groups approximating the four hypothesized procrastination-emotional upset types. Groups high in procrastination tended to be higher than groups low in procrastination on three hypothesized antecedents of procrastination: anxiety, the repressor/sensitizer construct, and pessimism. People who do not procrastinate as a rule, but are high in manifest upset when they do, were found to be lowest on these personality measures. The reverse was found for people high in procrastination. It was concluded that the three personality measures presumed to contribute to procrastination are adversely affected by the high frequency of emotional upset about procrastination experienced by those who procrastinate a great deal in handling life routines.