Emotion and Implicit Timing

What came before: Assimilation effects in the categorization of time intervals

Assimilation is the process by which one judgment tends to approach some aspect of another stimulus or judgment. This effect has been known for over half a century in various domains such as the judgment of weight or sound intensity. However, the assimilation of judgments of durations have been relatively unexplored. In the current article, we present the results of five experiments in which participant s were required to judge the duration of a visual stimulus on each trial. In each experiment, we manipulated the pattern of durations they experienced in order to systematically separate the effects of the objective and subjective duration of stimuli on subsequent judgments. We found that duration judgments were primarily driven by prior judgments, with little, if any, effect of the prior objective stimulus duration. This is in contrast to the findings previously reported in regards to non-temporal judgments. We propose two mechanist explanations of this effect; a representational account in which judgments represent the speed of an underlying pacemaker, and an assimilation account in which judgment is based in prior experience. We further discuss results in terms of predictive coding, in which the previous rating is representative of a prior expectation, which is modified by current experience.

The role of valence, arousal, stimulus type, and temporal paradigm in the effect of emotion on time perception: A meta-analysis

Anecdotal experiences show that the human perception of time is subjective, and changes with one's emotional state. Over the past 25 years, increasing empirical evidence has demonstrated that emotions distort time perception and usually result in overestimation. Yet, some inconsistencies deserve clarification. Specifically, it remains controversial how valence (positive/negative), arousal (high/low), stimulus type (scenic picture/facial expression/word/sound), and temporal paradigm (reproduction/estimation/discrimination) modulate the effect of emotion on time perception. Thus, the current study aimed to conduct a meta-analysis to quantify evidence for these moderators. After searching the Web of Science, SpiScholar, and Google Scholar, 95 effect sizes from 31 empirical studies were calculated using Hedges'g. The included studies involved 3,776 participants. The results a highlighted significant moderating effect of valence, arousal, stimulus type, and temporal paradigm. Specifically, negative valence tends to result in overestimation relative to positive valence; the increasing arousal leads to increasing temporal dilating; scenic picture, facial picture, and sound are more effective in inducing distortions than word; the overestimation can be better observed by discrimination and estimation paradigms relative to reproduction paradigms, and estimation paradigm is likely to be the most effective. These results suggest that the effect of emotion on time perception is influenced by valence, arousal, stimulus type, and temporal paradigm. These mitigating factors should be considered by scientists when studying time perception.

The regulatory roles of progesterone and estradiol on emotion processing in women

Emotion processing is known to interact with memory. Ovarian steroid hormones, such as progesterone and estradiol, modulate emotion processing and memory. However, it is unclear how these hormones influence brain activity when emotion processing is integrated with working memory (WM). Therefore, the objective of this study was to examine the relationship between endogenous hormonal concentration and brain activity during emotion processing in the context of a WM n-back task in 74 young women using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Results show that positive emotion processing activates reward-related areas, such as the caudate and putamen, whereas negative emotion processing activates a corticolimbic network, including the amygdala and hippocampus. Furthermore, our findings provide evidence that progesterone modulates more bottom-up brain activation during both positive and negative emotion processing, whereas estradiol activates lateralized, top-down regulation. These findings provide insight on the neural correlates of emotion processing during an n-back task in young women and highlight how important it is to consider women's endogenous hormonal concentration in neurobiological and cognition research.

Similar time distortions under the effect of emotion for durations of several minutes and a few seconds

This study examined the effect of emotion on the judgment of durations of several minutes compared with that of durations of a few seconds. Three experiments were performed on the temporal judgment of emotional stimuli lasting from 2 s to 6 min (Experiment 1) or from 2 to 6 min (Experiment 2 and 3). These involved emotional sounds (Experiment 1 and 2) or virtual reality emotional films (Experiment 3). The results showed an increase in the lengthening of the perceived duration as the level of arousal and negative valence of the emotional stimuli increased, both for the long durations of several minutes and for the shorter durations. However, the magnitude of the time distortion tended to decrease as the length of the duration increased because the affects experienced by the participants lost their intensity over time. Nonetheless, when the exposure to emotional stimuli was limited and the stimuli were sufficiently arousing, as in Experiments 2 and 3, people overestimated time across durations ranging from seconds to minutes.

Exploring the relationship between frontal asymmetry and emotional dampening

Cardiovascular emotional dampening is the term used to describe the inverse relationship between resting blood pressure and emotional responsivity which extends from normotensive to hypertensive ranges. Little is known about its underlying physiological mechanisms, but it is thought to involve some disruption in emotion processing. One area that has yet to be explored in the literature is the relationship between emotional dampening and frontal asymmetry, a psychophysiological indicator for motivational direction and emotional valence bias. The present study explored that relationship using data from a sample of 48 healthy college students. Measures of baseline resting blood pressure and frontal cortical activity were recorded, after which participants completed a series of emotion-related tasks. Results revealed a significant relationship between resting systolic blood pressure and left frontal activity. Likewise, left frontal activity was associated with neutral appraisal of emotionally valenced stimuli within the tasks. The findings from the present study yield support for a link between emotional dampening and left frontal activity. Implications are discussed.

Emotion and Implicit Timing: The Arousal Effect

This study tested the effects of emotion on implicit time judgment. The participants did not receive any overt temporal instructions. They were simply trained to respond as quickly as possible after a response signal, which was separated from a warning signal by a reference temporal interval. In the testing phase, the inter-signal interval was shorter, equal or longer than the reference interval and was filled by emotional pictures (EP) of different arousal levels: high, moderate, and low. The results showed a U-shaped curve of reaction time plotted against the interval duration, indicating an implicit processing of time. However, this RT-curve was shifted toward the left, with a significantly lower peak time for the high-arousal than for the low-arousal EP. This emotional time distortion in an implicit timing task suggests an automatic effect of emotion on the internal clock rate.