Research sheds light on the psychology behind patience and impatience

Patience -; like its corollary impatience -; has always been a sort of “I know it when I see it” concept. And that didn’t sit well with UC Riverside psychology researcher Kate Sweeny.

Philosophers and religious scholars call patience a virtue, yet most people claim to be impatient. That made me wonder if maybe patience is less about being a good person and more about how we deal with day-to-day frustrations.”

Kate Sweeny, psychology researcher, UC Riverside

For purposes of her research, Sweeny sought to better define what constitutes patience, and impatience, and the factors that determine them.

Impatience, she concluded across three studies of 1,200 people, is the emotion people feel when they face a delay that seems unfair, unreasonable, or inappropriate-;like a traffic jam outside of rush hour, or a meeting that should have ended 15 minutes ago. Patience, then, is how we cope with those feelings of impatience.

The studies’ findings were published recently in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin in the article “When Time is the Enemy: An Initial Test of the Process Model of Patience.”

Psychologists use the term “emotion regulation” to capture the many strategies people use to reduce (or sometimes increase) the intensity of their emotions. Patience, Sweeny asserts in a companion theoretical paper, is the subset of these strategies that particularly target feelings of impatience.

The first studies to test that idea were recently published in the article “When Time is the Enemy: An Initial Test of the Process Model of Patience,” in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

The studies asked participants to consider their responses to various frustrating situations one might encounter in everyday life. One depicted a traffic jam, another described a long, boring meeting, and others prompted them to imagine being stuck in a waiting room.

Participants indicated how impatient they would feel in response to each, then whether they would counter their impatience through strategies like distraction, deep breathing, or seeing the upsides of the situation.

The study results identified three scenarios that create a “perfect storm” for impatience: when the stakes are relatively high (traffic on the way to a favorite band’s concert), when the state of waiting is unpleasant (no seats and no distractions at the DMV), and when someone is clearly to blame for the delay (the lab forgot to process your medical test). People also felt more impatient when a delay was longer than they anticipated-;but surprisingly, not when they delay was relatively long or short.

Although nearly everyone in the studies said they would feel at least a bit impatient when facing those frustrating situations, some people were more patient than others. Participants who were more comfortable with open-ended situations and more emotionally stable (i.e., low in need for closure and neuroticism) said they wouldn’t feel too impatient in those scenarios; those who were more emotionally skilled and better at self-regulation said they would respond more patiently, even if they initially felt impatient. Being agreeable and high in empathy also predicted patience.

“Our initial findings support many of our ideas about patience and impatience,” Sweeny concludes. “We have a lot still to learn, but our approach is quite promising in terms of helping people to manage feelings of impatience and ultimately become more patient in their daily lives.”

Co-authors for “When Time is the Enemy” included graduate researchers Jason Hawes and Olivia T. Karaman. The companion theoretical paper, “On (Im)Patience: A New Approach to an Old Virtue,” was published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Review.