Why a vacation seems like it will end as soon as it begins

Vacation...it seems like it takes forever to get here, and then it is over before you know it.Time not only flies when you’re having fun – sometimes anticipating a fun event makes it feel like it will be over as soon as it begins, a new study suggests. Researchers found that people judge future positive events as being both farther away as well as shorter in duration than negative or neutral events. Combining those two elements has a strange effect when people look forward to a positive event like a vacation, said Selin Malkoc, co-author of the study and associate professor of marketing at The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business.

“The seemingly endless wait for the vacation to start combined with the feeling that the vacation will fly by leads people to feel like the beginning and the end of their time off as similarly far from the present,” Malkoc said. “In other words, in their mind’s eye, the vacation is over as soon as it begins. It has no duration.”

The study was published online recently in the Journal of Consumer Psychology …and on MSN and Daily Mail.

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