How Time Attitudes Shape Academic Success: The Protective Pathways of Emotion Regulation and School Well-Being in Adolescents.

Résumé

Time perspectives represent a fundamental dimension of adolescent development that may influence academic outcomes through emotional and interpersonal mechanisms. In this study, we examined how time attitude profiles relate to academic achievement in language and mathematics and whether emotion regulation difficulties and school well-being function as mediating mechanisms. A sample of 257 Chilean adolescents with a mean age of 14.36 years ( = 0.57) from nine schools completed self-report measures of time attitudes, emotion regulation difficulties, and school well-being and provided school grades in language and mathematics. Latent profile analysis identified three time attitude profiles: Ambivalent, Positive, and Optimistic. Descriptive analyses showed that students with Positive and Optimistic profiles reported higher school well-being and fewer emotion regulation difficulties than Ambivalents, although mean differences in academic achievement across profiles were small. In mixed-effects models, time attitude profiles did not robustly predict language achievement once covariates were controlled, and only adolescents with an Optimistic profile showed slightly higher mathematics achievement than Ambivalents. Mediation models indicated that school well-being significantly mediated the association between the Positive time attitude profile and both mathematics and language achievement, whereas emotion regulation difficulties did not emerge as significant mediators for either subject. These findings highlight school well-being as a key psychosocial mechanism linking positive temporal orientations to academic outcomes and suggest that school-based interventions targeting time attitudes and school well-being may foster adolescents' academic success.