Emotional time distortions: The fundamental role of arousal

Abstract

An emotion-based lengthening effect on the perception of durations of emotional pictures has been assumed to result from an arousal-based mechanism, involving the activation of an internal clock system. The aim of this study was to systematically examine the arousal effect on time perception when different discrete emotions were considered. The participants were asked to verbally estimate the duration of emotional pictures from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS). The pictures varied either in arousal level, i.e., high/low-arousal, for the same discrete emotion (disgust or sadness) or in the depicted emotion, e.g., disgust/fear for pictures matched for arousal (high-arousal). The results systematically revealed a lengthening effect on the perception of the duration of the emotional compared to the neutral pictures and indicated that the magnitude of this effect increased with arousal level. Nevertheless, variations in time perception were observed for one and the same arousal level, with the duration of disgust-inducing pictures (e.g., body mutilation) being judged longer than that of fear-inducing pictures (e.g., snake). These results suggest that arousal is a fundamental mechanism mediating the effect of emotion on time perception. However, the effect cannot be reduced to arousal, since the impact of the content of pictures also plays a critical role.

Keywords:

• Timing
• Time perception
• Emotion
• Emotional pictures
• Arousal

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by a grant from the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR: Emotion(s), Cognition, Comportement (EMCO), France.

Notes

¹To examine the proportion of temporal distortions between the emotional and neutral cues explained by individual differences identified in the three completed questionnaires, we transformed the raw time estimates into d scores as in several other publications in this domain (Droit-Volet & Gil, 2009; Effron et al., 2006; Mondillon et al., 2007; Tipples, 2011). A d score corresponds to the difference between time performance for emotional stimuli compared to neutral ones. Consequently, d scores significantly above zero indicate a temporal overestimation of emotional cues relative to neutral ones, with the opposite being true for d scores below zero. Multiple linear regression analyses were conducted to identify whether emotional dispositions such as anxiety, sensitivity to disgust or depressive mood, can predict time estimation differences. The analyses yielded no significant effect for any of the emotional conditions, thus indicating that these individual difference factors did not impact on the time estimations.