The emotional body and time perception

Abstract

We examined the effects of emotional bodily expressions on the perception of time. Participants were shown bodily expressions of fear, happiness and sadness in a temporal bisection task featuring different stimulus duration ranges. Stimulus durations were judged to be longer for bodily expressions of fear than for those of sadness, whereas no significant difference was observed between sad and happy postures. In addition, the magnitude of the lengthening effect of fearful versus sad postures increased with duration range. These results suggest that the perception of fearful bodily expressions increases the level of arousal which, in turn, speeds up the internal clock system underlying the representation of time. The effect of bodily expressions on time perception is thus consistent with findings for other highly arousing emotional stimuli, such as emotional facial expressions.

Keywords:

• Timing
• Time perception
• Emotional body
• Bodily expression
• Emotion

Acknowledgment

The authors would like to thank Laétitia Bartomeuf (research assistant) and Guillaume Blanc (MA student) for collecting data from the students.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ For technical reasons, the subjective emotional assessment of some pictures on the 9-point scales was not recorded for a few number of participants: arousal and valence assessment: fear/sadness groups: one participant in the 400/1600-ms condition, one participant in the 600/2400-ms and two participants in the 200/800-ms condition; happiness/sadness groups: one participant in the 400/1600-ms and one in the 600/2400-ms condition; discrete emotion assessment: fear/sadness groups: one participant in the 400/1600-ms, one participant in the 600/2400-ms condition; happiness/sadness groups: two participants in the 400/1200-ms condition.

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded from the French National Research Agency (ANR) [grant number ANR-11-EMCO-01201] and from the European Commission [Project: TIMESTORM], Horizon 2020 research and innovation action [grant number H2020-FETPROACT-2014].