Reminiscing and the Passage of Years: Investigating the Role of Affective Autobiographical Memories in Passage of Time Judgments

Ease-of-retrieval mediates the relations of negative emotional states and passage of time judgments

Little research has investigated the relations of emotional states and passage of time judgments over a long period and explored the mechanisms underlying the relations. In this research, we conducted three studies (N = 2010 in total) in the three time points throughout a year including the end of 2020, the beginning and middle of 2021. In each study, we measured participants' negative emotional states that arise in daily life (including loneliness, anxiety, and depression), feelings of how easy/hard to recall the things having done in the last year, and yearly passage of time judgments. The results from the three studies consistently showed that individuals' feelings of ease-of-retrieval mediated the relations of negative emotional states and yearly passage of time judgments. The stronger the negative emotional states, the harder people feel to recall the things from the last year, and the faster people perceive time passing last year. This research provides novel insights for understanding the relations of negative emotional states and passage of time judgments, and importantly, individuals' feelings of ease-of-retrieval plays a significant role on explaining the relations.

Distortions to the passage of time for annual events: Exploring why Christmas and Ramadan feel like they come around more quickly each year

BACKGROUND

Commonly heard statements such as "Christmas comes around more quickly each year" suggest that the passage of time between annual events can become distorted, leading to the sensation of time passing more quickly than normal. At present however, it is unclear how prevalent such beliefs are and, what factors are predictive of it.

AIM

To explore the prevalence of beliefs that annual events such as Christmas (Study 1 UK sample) and Ramadan (Study 2 Iraqi sample) feel like they come around more quickly each year. To establish the association between distortions to the passage of time between annual events and emotional wellbeing, event specific enjoyment, memory function and self-reported attention to time.

METHODS

Participants completed an online questionnaire exploring their subjective experience of time in relation to Christmas and Ramadan. In addition, measures of attention to time, memory function, quality of life and event specific emotion were also taken.

FINDINGS

There was widespread agreement that Christmas and Ramadan appeared to come around more quickly each year. In both countries, this belief was associated with greater prospective memory errors, greater attention to time and greater enjoyment of the event. Furthermore, in the UK greater belief that Christmas comes around more quickly was associated with lower social quality of life and in Iraq, greater belief that Ramadan comes around more quickly each year was associated with lower age and female gender.

CONCLUSIONS

Distortions to the passage of time for annual events are widespread, occur across multiple cultures and are consistently predicted by prospective function, event enjoyment and attention to time. The absence of an association between older age (above 55 years) and a faster passage of time suggests that caution should be taken when concluding that time passes more quickly with increasing age.

The subjective experience of time during the pandemic in Germany: The big slowdown

Several COVID-19 studies on the felt passage of time have been conducted due to the strong feeling of time distortion many people have experienced during the pandemic. Overall, a relative decelaration of time passage was generally associated with negative affect and social isolation; a relative acceleration was associated with an increase in routine in daily life. There is some variability in results depending on the country of study and COVID-19 restrictions introduced, participants’ demographics, and questionnaire items applied. Here we present a study conducted in May 2021 in Germany including n = 500 participants to assess time perception, emotional reactions, and attitudes towards the countermeasures. The passage of time judgments (POTJ) for the preceding 12 months during the pandemic were compared to data addressing the same question posed in previous studies conducted before the outbreak of COVID-19. The previous year was rated as having passed relatively slower during the pandemic compared to the ratings from before the pandemic. The duration judgments (DJ) of the 14 months since the start of the pandemic showed a bimodal distribution with both relatively shorter and relatively longer DJs. Higher levels of several negative emotions, as well as less social satisfaction, were associated with prolonged DJs and partially slower POTJs. Fear for health was not linked with the subjective experience of time, but exploratory analyses suggested that higher levels of fear were linked to more positive evaluations and approval of the governmental countermeasures. Those who reported higher levels of negative, agitated-aggressive emotions showed lower levels of consent with these measures.

The Passage of Years: Not a Matter of Covert Retrieval of Autobiographical Memories

In current research, variations in retrospective passage of time judgments for long intervals are commonly attributed to differences regarding the number of experiences in these intervals or the accessibility of the respective memories. This seems to imply the assumption of a covert retrieval, where authors presume that memories from the respective interval influence the experience of time without these memories being explicitly activated when judging. However, no studies have systematically investigated the relation between the experience of time and the respective experiences and memories. To this end, we analyzed data from three studies in which participants judged the passage of the last 5 years either before being asked to select outstanding life events from a list (Studies 1a and b; N = 293 and 263) or before recalling as many meaningful personal memories as were spontaneously accessible (Study 2; N = 262). Despite applying a statistically powerful trial-by-trial mixed-effects modeling approach, neither in the separate datasets nor in the combined dataset, passage of time judgments were predicted by the number of reported events or memories. This suggests that people's spontaneous judgments of the passage of multiannual intervals are not necessarily affected by a covert retrieval of memories from the respective period.