How emotions change time

An event-termination cue causes perceived time to dilate

The perceived duration of time does not veridically reflect the physical duration but is distorted by various factors, such as the stimulus magnitude or the observer's emotional state. Here, we showed that knowledge about an event's termination time is another significant factor. We often experience time passage differently when we know that an event will terminate soon. To quantify this, we asked 33 university students to report a rotating clock hand's duration with or without a termination cue that indicated the position at which the clock hand disappeared. The results showed that the presence of the termination cue dilated perceived durations, and the dilating effect was larger when the stimulus duration was longer, or the speed of the rotating stimulus was slower. A control experiment with a start-cue excluded the possibility that the cue's mere existence caused the results. Further computational analyses based on the attention theory-of-time perception revealed that the size of dilation is best explained by neither an event's duration nor the distance traveled by the clock hand, but by how long the clock hand spends time near the termination cue. The results imply that an event-termination cue generates a field in which the perceived time dilates.

Distortions in time perception related to videogames, pornography, and TV series exposure: An experimental study in three independent samples

Background and aims

Time perception is a cognitive process involving both the ability to estimate the duration of an event (time estimation, TE) and the subjective perception of its passage (time passage, TP). Studies show that alteration in TE/TP is associated with substance use disorders. However, little is known about the impact of these alterations in potentially problematic online behaviors. We explore TE and TP while participants were exposed to cues related to videogames, pornography, and TV series, and the relationship of TE and TP with scores from instruments that measure problematic gaming (PG), problematic pornography use (PPU), and problematic binge-watching (BW).

Methods

Participants from three independent samples (40 men from Luxembourg; 99 Spanish men, 111 Spanish women) completed an experimental task designed to assess TE and TP while they were exposed to short clips related to videogames, pornography, TV series, and documentaries (control condition). Participants also completed different self-reports.

Results

Whereas men underestimated the time that they were exposed to pornography and TV series, women overestimated it. For videogames, we showed a consistent pattern of overestimation of time duration. Time was systematically perceived as passing faster while participants were presented with TV series and pornography. Regarding the association between time perception and PG, PPU, and BW, TE did not correlate with any of the indicators of problematic engagement assessed; but TP correlated with several of these indicators.

Discussion and conclusions

The present preliminary results showed mixed evidence regarding the involvement of time perception in gaming, pornography use, and binge-watching.

The effect of emotion intensity on time perception: a study with transcranial random noise stimulation

Emotional facial expressions provide cues for social interactions and emotional events can distort our sense of time. The present study investigates the effect of facial emotional stimuli of anger and sadness on time perception. Moreover, to investigate the causal role of the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) in emotional recognition, we employed transcranial random noise stimulation (tRNS) over OFC and tested the effect on participants' emotional recognition as well as on time processing. Participants performed a timing task in which they were asked to categorize as "short" or "long" temporal intervals marked by images of people expressing anger, sad or neutral emotional facial expressions. In addition, they were asked to judge if the image presented was of a person expressing anger or sadness. The visual stimuli were facial emotional stimuli indicating anger or sadness with different degrees of intensity at high (80%), medium (60%) and low (40%) intensity, along with neutral emotional face stimuli. In the emotional recognition task, results showed that participants were faster and more accurate when emotional intensity was higher. Moreover, tRNS over OFC interfered with emotion recognition, which is in line with its proposed role in emotion recognition. In the timing task, participants overestimated the duration of angry facial expressions, although neither emotional intensity not OFC stimulation significantly modulated this effect. Conversely, as the emotional intensity increased, participants exhibited a greater tendency to overestimate the duration of sad faces in the sham condition. However, this tendency disappeared with tRNS. Taken together, our results are partially consistent with previous findings showing an overestimation effect of emotionally arousing stimuli, revealing the involvement of OFC in emotional distortions of time, which needs further investigation.

Change in Time Perception Following the Place of Pre-Existence Technique

Time perception is closely related to spatial and bodily perception, yet little is known about how this interrelationship is impacted by meditation and biological sex. To examine this, we studied the effects of a stepwise application of three meditation techniques, from focused attention, to open monitoring to non-dual meditation, encompassed in the Place of Pre-Existence technique (PPEt) on the subjective perception of time, space and body using a pre-post research design. A total of 280 participants (mean age = 47.09 years; SD = 10.13; 127:153 males to females) completed the Subjective Time, Self, Space inventory before and after PPEt. Following PPEt, participants perceived time passing as slowing down, while time intensity, relaxation, 'awareness of space' and 'awareness of body' increased, suggesting heightened mindfulness to these constructs following the training. Awareness of space revealed to be modulated by biological sex and meditation expertise, with males showing a decrease of spatial awareness as a function of meditation expertise while females showed an opposite pattern. The speed and intensity of the experience of time both correlated with body and space awareness. In line with previous studies demonstrating a connection between relaxation and perception of time, a significant correlation was found between relaxation and the subjective experience of the intensity of time. The current results are discussed in the context of the embodied experience of time, and the Sphere Model of Consciousness.

Affective experience in a virtual crowd regulates perceived travel time

Time sometimes feels like it is flying by or slowing down. Previous research indicates objective number of items, subjective affect, and heart rate all can influence the experience of time. While these factors are usually tested in isolation with simple stimuli in the laboratory, here we examined them together in the ecological context of a virtual subway ride. We hypothesized that subjective affective experience associated with objective crowding lengthens subjective trip duration. Participants (N = 41) experienced short (1-2 min) immersive virtual reality subway trips with different levels of public crowding. Consistent with the immersive nature of decreased interpersonal virtual space, increased crowding decreased pleasantness and increased the unpleasantness of a trip. Virtual crowding also lengthened perceived trip duration. The presence of one additional person per square meter of the train significantly increased perceived travel time by an average of 1.8 s. Degree of pleasant relative to unpleasant affect mediated why crowded trips felt longer. Independently of crowding and affect, heart rate changes were related to experienced trip time. These results demonstrate socioemotional regulation of the experience of time and that effects of social crowding on perception and affect can be reliably created during a solitary virtual experience. This study demonstrates a novel use of Virtual Reality technology for testing psychological theories in ecologically valid and highly controlled settings.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10055-022-00713-8.

The Effects of Angry Expressions and Fearful Expressions on Duration Perception: An ERP Study

Little is known about the electrophysiological basis of the effect of threat-related emotional stimuli with different motivational direction on duration perception. Thus, event-related potentials were employed to examine the effects of angry expressions and fearful expressions on perception of different duration (490-910 ms). Behavioral results showed there was a greater underestimation of the duration of angry expressions (approach-motivated negative stimuli) than fearful expressions (withdrawal-motivated negative stimuli), compared with neutral expressions. Event-related potentials results showed that, the area of Contingent Negative Variation (CNV) evoked by angry expression, fearful expression and neutral expression gradually increased. These results indicated that specific electrophysiological mechanisms may underlie the attention effects of angry and fearful expressions on timing. Specifically, compared with neutral expressions, fearful expressions and angry expressions both are likely to distract more attentional resources from timer, in particular, angry expressions attract more attention resources than fearful expressions from timer. The major contribution of the current study is to provide electrophysiological evidences of fear vs. anger divergence in the aspect of time perception and to demonstrate beyond the behavioral level that the categorization of threat-related emotions should be refined so to highlight the adaptability of the human defense system.

Psychosocial factors affecting sleep misperception in middle-aged community-dwelling adults

Sleep misperception has long been a major issue in the field of insomnia research. Most studies of sleep misperception examine sleep underestimation by comparing the results of polysomnography conducted in a laboratory environment with patients' sleep diary entries. We aimed to investigate psychosocial characteristics of adults who underestimated or overestimated sleep time in a nonclinical, middle-aged community-dwelling population. We collected one week of sleep data with wrist-worn accelerometers. We used egocentric social network analysis to analyze the effects of psychosocial factors. Among 4,060 study participants, 922 completed the accelerometer substudy. Underestimation was defined as an accelerometer-measured sleep time ≥ 6 h and a subjective sleep time < 6 h. Overestimation was defined as an objective sleep time < 6 h and a subjective sleep time ≥ 6 h. Psychosocial characteristics of the sleep misperception group were evaluated using multivariate regression analysis. A total of 47 participants underestimated sleep time, and 420 overestimated sleep time. Regression analysis revealed that women, living with spouse, economic satisfaction, and bridging potential had protective effects against sleep underestimation. Blame from a spouse involved a 3.8-times higher risk of underestimation than the control group (p = 0.002). In men, discussing concerns with a spouse had a protective effect against underestimation (p < 0.001). Economic satisfaction, feeling social network-based intimacy, and support from a spouse were associated with overestimation in women. In men, feeling social network-based intimacy was also associated with overestimation (p < 0.001). We found that social relationship quality was related to sleep overestimation and underestimation. This association was marked in women. Good social relationships may have positive effects on sleep misperception via attenuation of negative emotional reactions and effects on emotional regulation.

Navigating Through Time: A Spatial Navigation Perspective on How the Brain May Encode Time

Interval timing, which operates on timescales of seconds to minutes, is distributed across multiple brain regions and may use distinct circuit mechanisms as compared to millisecond timing and circadian rhythms. However, its study has proven difficult, as timing on this scale is deeply entangled with other behaviors. Several circuit and cellular mechanisms could generate sequential or ramping activity patterns that carry timing information. Here we propose that a productive approach is to draw parallels between interval timing and spatial navigation, where direct analogies can be made between the variables of interest and the mathematical operations necessitated. Along with designing experiments that isolate or disambiguate timing behavior from other variables, new techniques will facilitate studies that directly address the neural mechanisms that are responsible for interval timing.

Time flies faster when you're feeling blue: sad mood induction accelerates the perception of time in a temporal judgment task

Investigating the interaction of mood and time perception has provided key information in the mechanisms that underlie cognition and emotion. However, much of the literature that has investigated the role of emotions in time perception has focused on the valence of stimuli, or correlational studies of self-reported mood. In the present study, 31 healthy undergraduates completed a temporal judgment task before and after an autobiographical sad mood induction procedure. In the temporal judgment task, participants identified whether a presented neutral stimulus was onscreen for the same duration as a target (2 s). Along with target trials, very short (1.25 s), short (1.6 s), long (2.25 s), and very long (3.125 s) trials were presented in random order and in equal proportion. Following mood induction, ratings of sadness and fear increased, but returned to baseline at the end of the study. After the mood induction, participants significantly increased temporal overestimation as participants were more likely to affirm short than long-duration trials as matching the target. These results indicate that transient changes in mood in otherwise healthy adults can accelerate the subjective experience of time. Sadness may increase physiological components of time perception that are related approach motivation.

Does the insula contribute to emotion-related distortion of time? A neuropsychological approach

The literature points to a large distributed brain network involved in the estimation of time. Among these regions, the role of the insular cortex is still poorly understood. At the confluence of emotional, interoceptive, and environmental signals, this brain structure has been proposed to underlie awareness of the passage of time and emotion related time dilation. Yet, this assumption has not been tested so far. This study aimed at exploring how a lesion of the insula affects subjective duration, either in an emotional context or in a non-emotional context. Twenty-one patients with a stroke affecting the insula, either left or right, were studied for their perception of sub and supra second durations. A verbal estimation task and a temporal bisection task were used with either pure tones or neutral and emotional sounds lasting between 300 and 1500 ms and presented monaurally. Results revealed that patients with a right insular lesion, showed less temporal sensitivity than both control participants and patients with a left insular lesion. Unexpectedly, emotional effects were similar in patients and control participants. Altogether, these results suggest a specific role of the right insula in the discrimination of durations, but not in emotion related temporal distortion. In addition, an ear × emotion interaction in control participants suggests that temporal processing of positive and negative sounds may be lateralized in the brain.

Time flies faster under time pressure

We examined the effects of time pressure on duration estimation in a verbal estimation task and a production task. In both temporal tasks, participants had to solve mazes in two conditions of time pressure (with or without), and with three different target durations (30 s, 60 s, and 90 s). In each trial of the verbal estimation task, participants had to estimate in conventional time units (minutes and seconds) the amount of time that had elapsed since they started to solve the maze. In the production task, they had to press a key while solving the maze when they thought that the trial's duration had reached a target value. Results showed that in both tasks, durations were judged longer with time pressure than without it. However, this temporal overestimation under time pressure did not increase with the length of the target duration. These results are discussed within the framework of scalar expectancy theory.

Pain dilates time perception

We have all experienced that time seems stretched during unpleasant situations. While there is evidence of subjective time overestimation when perceiving external unpleasant stimuli, no study has measured the dilation of time when individuals experience an unpleasant situation in their own body. Here we measured the time dilation induced by a painful homeostatic deviance using temporal bisection task. We show that being in pain leads to an expansion of subjective time whereby a stronger increase in pain perception relative to non-painful stimulation leads to a stronger time-estimate distortion. Neurophysiological studies suggest that time estimation and the perception of self might share a common neural substrate. We propose that, along with bodily arousal and attentional capture, the enhancement of self-awareness may be critical to support dilated subjective time when experiencing pain. As other homeostatic deviances, pain may induce a focus on ourselves contributing to the impression that “time stands still”.

Attentional Mechanisms during the Performance of a Subsecond Timing Task

There is evidence that timing processes in the suprasecond scale are modulated by attentional mechanisms; in addition, some studies have shown that attentional mechanisms also affect timing in the subsecond scale. Our aim was to study eye movements and pupil diameter during a temporal bisection task in the subsecond range. Subjects were trained to discriminate anchor intervals of 200 or 800 msec, and were then confronted with intermediate durations. Eye movements revealed that subjects used different cognitive strategies during the bisection timing task. When the stimulus to be timed appeared randomly at a central or 4 peripheral positions on a screen, some subjects choose to maintain their gaze toward the central area while other followed the peripheral placement of the stimulus; some others subjects used both strategies. The time of subjective equality did not differ between subjects who employed different attentional mechanisms. However, differences emerged in the timing variance and attentional indexes (time taken to initial fixation, latency to respond, pupil dilatation and duration and number of fixations to stimulus areas). Timing in the subsecond range seems invariant despite the use of different attentional strategies. Future research should determine whether the selection of attentional mechanisms is related to particular timing tasks or instructions or whether it represents idiosyncratic cognitive “styles”.

Emotional modulation of interval timing and time perception

Like other senses, our perception of time is not veridical, but rather, is modulated by changes in environmental context. Anecdotal experiences suggest that emotions can be powerful modulators of time perception; nevertheless, the functional and neural mechanisms underlying emotion-induced temporal distortions remain unclear. Widely accepted pacemaker-accumulator models of time perception suggest that changes in arousal and attention have unique influences on temporal judgments and contribute to emotional distortions of time perception. However, such models conflict with current views of arousal and attention suggesting that current models of time perception do not adequately explain the variability in emotion-induced temporal distortions. Instead, findings provide support for a new perspective of emotion-induced temporal distortions that emphasizes both the unique and interactive influences of arousal and attention on time perception over time. Using this framework, we discuss plausible functional and neural mechanisms of emotion-induced temporal distortions and how these temporal distortions may have important implications for our understanding of how emotions modulate our perceptual experiences in service of adaptive responding to biologically relevant stimuli.

Ecstatic Epileptic Seizures: A Glimpse into the Multiple Roles of the Insula

Ecstatic epileptic seizures are a rare but compelling epileptic entity. During the first seconds of these seizures, ecstatic auras provoke feelings of well-being, intense serenity, bliss, and "enhanced self-awareness." They are associated with the impression of time dilation, and can be described as a mystic experience by some patients. The functional neuroanatomy of ecstatic seizures is still debated. During recent years several patients presenting with ecstatic auras have been reported by others and us (in total n = 52); a few of them in the setting of presurgical evaluation including electrical brain stimulation. According to the recently recognized functions of the insula, and the results of nuclear brain imaging and electrical stimulation, the ecstatic symptoms in these patients seem to localize to a functional network centered around the anterior insular cortex, where we thus propose to locate this rare ictal phenomenon. Here we summarize the role of the multiple sensory, autonomic, affective, and cognitive functions of the insular cortex, which are integrated into the creation of self-awareness, and we suggest how this system may become dysfunctional on several levels during ecstatic aura.

Detecting Temporal Change in Dynamic Sounds: On the Role of Stimulus Duration, Speed, and Emotion

For dynamic sounds, such as vocal expressions, duration often varies alongside speed. Compared to longer sounds, shorter sounds unfold more quickly. Here, we asked whether listeners implicitly use this confound when representing temporal regularities in their environment. In addition, we explored the role of emotions in this process. Using a mismatch negativity (MMN) paradigm, we asked participants to watch a silent movie while passively listening to a stream of task-irrelevant sounds. In Experiment 1, one surprised and one neutral vocalization were compressed and stretched to create stimuli of 378 and 600 ms duration. Stimuli were presented in four blocks, two of which used surprised and two of which used neutral expressions. In one surprised and one neutral block, short and long stimuli served as standards and deviants, respectively. In the other two blocks, the assignment of standards and deviants was reversed. We observed a climbing MMN-like negativity shortly after deviant onset, which suggests that listeners implicitly track sound speed and detect speed changes. Additionally, this MMN-like effect emerged earlier and was larger for long than short deviants, suggesting greater sensitivity to duration increments or slowing down than to decrements or speeding up. Last, deviance detection was facilitated in surprised relative to neutral blocks, indicating that emotion enhances temporal processing. Experiment 2 was comparable to Experiment 1 with the exception that sounds were spectrally rotated to remove vocal emotional content. This abolished the emotional processing benefit, but preserved the other effects. Together, these results provide insights into listener sensitivity to sound speed and raise the possibility that speed biases duration judgements implicitly in a feed-forward manner. Moreover, this bias may be amplified for duration increments relative to decrements and within an emotional relative to a neutral stimulus context.

Reduced Sensitivity to Sooner Reward During Intertemporal Decision-Making Following Insula Damage in Humans

During intertemporal choice, humans tend to prefer small-sooner rewards over larger-delayed rewards, reflecting temporal discounting (TD) of delayed outcomes. Functional neuroimaging (fMRI) evidence has implicated the insular cortex in time-sensitive decisions, yet it is not clear whether activity in this brain region is crucial for, or merely associated with, TD behavior. Here, patients with damage to the insula (Insular patients), control patients with lesions outside the insula, and healthy individuals chose between smaller-sooner and larger-later monetary rewards. Insular patients were less sensitive to sooner rewards than were the control groups, exhibiting reduced TD. A Voxel-based Lesion-Symptom Mapping (VLSM) analysis confirmed a statistically significant association between insular damage and reduced TD. These results indicate that the insular cortex is crucial for intertemporal choice. We suggest that he insula may be necessary to anticipate the bodily/emotional effects of receiving rewards at different delays, influencing the computation of their incentive value. Devoid of such input, insular patients' choices would be governed by a heuristic of quantity, allowing patients to wait for larger options.

The emotional body and time perception

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.

The complex duration perception of emotional faces: effects of face direction

The perceived duration of emotional face stimuli strongly depends on the expressed emotion. But, emotional faces also differ regarding a number of other features like gaze, face direction, or sex. Usually, these features have been controlled by only using pictures of female models with straight gaze and face direction. Doi and Shinohara (2009) reported that an overestimation of angry faces could only be found when the model's gaze was oriented toward the observer. We aimed at replicating this effect for face direction. Moreover, we explored the effect of face direction on the duration perception sad faces. Controlling for the sex of the face model and the participant, female and male participants rated the duration of neutral, angry, and sad face stimuli of both sexes photographed from different perspectives in a bisection task. In line with current findings, we report a significant overestimation of angry compared to neutral face stimuli that was modulated by face direction. Moreover, the perceived duration of sad face stimuli did not differ from that of neutral faces and was not influenced by face direction. Furthermore, we found that faces of the opposite sex appeared to last longer than those of the same sex. This outcome is discussed with regards to stimulus parameters like the induced arousal, social relevance, and an evolutionary context.

The compression of perceived time in a hot environment depends on physiological and psychological factors

The human perception of time was observed under extremely hot conditions. Young healthy men performed a time production task repeatedly in 4 experimental trials in either a temperate (22 °C, relative humidity 35%) or a hot (42 °C, relative humidity 18%) environment and with or without a moderate-intensity treadmill exercise. Within 1 hour, the produced durations indicated a significant compression of short intervals (0.5 to 10 s) in the combination of exercising and high ambient temperature, while neither variable/condition alone was enough to yield the effect. Temporal judgement was analysed in relation to different indicators of arousal, such as critical flicker frequency (CFF), core temperature, heart rate, and subjective ratings of fatigue and exertion. The arousal-sensitive internal clock model (originally proposed by Treisman) is used to explain the temporal compression while exercising in heat. As a result, we suggest that the psychological response to heat stress, the more precisely perceived fatigue, is important in describing the relationship between core temperature and time perception. Temporal compression is related to higher core temperature, but only if a certain level of perceived fatigue is accounted for, implying the existence of a thermoemotional internal clock.

The inner sense of time: how the brain creates a representation of duration

A large number of competing models exist for how the brain creates a representation of time. However, several human and animal studies point to 'climbing neural activation' as a potential neural mechanism for the representation of duration. Neurophysiological recordings in animals have revealed how climbing neural activation that peaks at the end of a timed interval underlies the processing of duration, and, in humans, climbing neural activity in the insular cortex, which is associated with feeling states of the body and emotions, may be related to the cumulative representation of time.

Dissociation of the role of the prelimbic cortex in interval timing and resource allocation: beneficial effect of norepinephrine and dopamine reuptake inhibitor nomifensine on anxiety-inducing distraction

Emotional distracters impair cognitive function. Emotional processing is dysregulated in affective disorders such as depression, phobias, schizophrenia, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Among the processes impaired by emotional distracters, and whose dysregulation is documented in affective disorders, is the ability to time in the seconds-to-minutes range, i.e., interval timing. Presentation of task-irrelevant distracters during a timing task results in a delay in responding suggesting a failure to maintain subjective time in working memory, possibly due to attentional and working memory resources being diverted away from timing, as proposed by the Relative Time-Sharing (RTS) model. We investigated the role of the prelimbic cortex in the detrimental effect of anxiety-inducing task-irrelevant distracters on the cognitive ability to keep track of time, using local infusions of norepinephrine and dopamine reuptake inhibitor (NDRI) nomifensine in a modified peak-interval procedure with neutral and anxiety-inducing distracters. Given that some anti-depressants have beneficial effects on attention and working memory, e.g., decreasing emotional response to negative events, we hypothesized that nomifensine would improve maintenance of information in working memory in trials with distracters, resulting in a decrease of the disruptive effect of emotional events on the timekeeping abilities. Our results revealed a dissociation of the effects of nomifensine infusion in prelimbic cortex between interval timing and resource allocation, and between neutral and anxiety-inducing distraction. Nomifensine was effective only during trials with distracters, but not during trials without distracters. Nomifensine reduced the detrimental effect of the distracters only when the distracters were anxiety-inducing, but not when they were neutral. Results are discussed in relation to the brain circuits involved in RTS of resources, and the pharmacological management of affective disorders.