Relations between emotion, memory encoding, and time perception

ABSTRACT

This study examined duration judgments for taboo and neutral words in prospective and retrospective timing tasks. In the prospective task, participants attended to time from the beginning and generated shorter duration estimates for taboo than neutral words and for words that they subsequently recalled in a surprise free recall task. These findings suggested that memory encoding took priority over estimating durations, directing attention away from time and causing better recall but shorter perceived durations for taboo than neutral words. However, in the retrospective task, participants only judged durations in a surprise test at the end, and their duration estimates were longer for taboo than neutral words. Present findings therefore suggest that the same emotion-linked memory encoding processes can cause underestimation of durations in prospective tasks but overestimation in retrospective tasks, as if emotion enhances recall of ongoing events but causes overestimation of the durations of those events in retrospect.

KEYWORDS:

• Attention
• emotion
• memory
• time perception
• prospective versus retrospective duration judgments

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. It was not possible to perform an ANOVA on these data due to missing cases (e.g. if a participant did not recall any words that were shown for 400 ms, we would need to exclude all of his or her data from the analysis).