Edited by: Valerie Doyere, CNRS, France
Reviewed by: Ullrich Wagner, Charité - University Medicine Berlin, Germany; Jason Tipples, University of Hull, UK
*Correspondence: Sylvie Droit-Volet, Laboratoire de Psychologie Sociale et Cognitive, CNRS, UMR 6024, Université Blaise Pascal, 34 Avenue Carnot, 63037 Clermont-Ferrand, France. e-mail:
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Previous research into emotion and time perception has been designed to study the time perception of emotional events themselves (e.g., facial expression). Our aim was to investigate the effect of emotions
In everyday life, the experience of a mood changes our relationship with time. When we are sad and depressed we have the feeling that the flow of time slows down. Every hour seems like an eternity, as if time had stopped. In contrast, the feeling of stress seems to accelerate the flow of time. One hour seems nothing. Although these mood-related fluctuations in our experience of time have often been described, they have rarely been experimentally studied. Finally, we do not know whether these explicit judgments concerning the passage of time correspond to a reality experienced in our bodies or brains.
It may seem strange to speak about the reality of time since humans are not equipped with any specific sensory receptor enabling them to capture temporal information (for recent reviews, see Coull et al.,
As of some 10 years ago, researchers started to systematically investigate the mechanisms involved in the time distortions that are seen to occur in the presence of emotions. Unlike the pioneering psychologists who invented original situations without, however, perfectly controlling the emotional environment (e.g., Falk and Bindra,
However, these different studies have investigated the judgment of the presentation duration of emotional stimuli rather than the effect of emotional states (mood)
The emotional stimuli used in the studies described above therefore have only a limited ability to produce intense forms of emotion which persist over time, with the result that it is only possible to study the effects of emotion on the perception of very short durations. The only studies that have elicited intense, long-lived emotions are probably the animal-based studies that have used fear conditioning paradigms based on the administration of electric shocks (e.g., Meck,
The originality of the present study therefore lies in the attempt to examine the effect of mood experience on participants’ subsequent time judgment of neutral events. We used an emotion elicitation technique that had not previously been employed in studies of time perception, namely emotional film clips. We used three types of films from the recent database of films validated by Schaefer et al., (
Forty-five psychology students (Mean age = 19.46, SD = 1.31, 40 women and 5 men) participated in order to fulfill a course requirement and signed a written consent form as required by the Clermont-Ferrand Sud-Est VI Statutory Ethics Committee (CPP).
The experiment took place in an isolated room at Blaise Pascal University. The participants were seated in front a PC, with a 17″ screen, that controlled the experimental events via E-prime software. Two loudspeakers were placed on either side of the computer. The stimulus to be timed was always a blue circle presented in the center of the computer screen. The response (long or short) consisted of pressing the “
The participants were assigned to one of two duration conditions: 200/800 or 400/1600-ms. In the 200/800 condition, the short (
Each session consisted of two bisection tasks, a baseline bisection task given before film presentation (pre-film), which was followed by a test bisection task administered after film presentation (post-film). In the bisection task performed before the film, the participants were first presented with
Table
Fear | Sadness | Neutral | ||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Before | After | Before | After | Before | After | |||||||
SEM | SEM | SEM | SEM | SEM | SEM | |||||||
Lively | 2.44 | 0.12 | 2.42 | 0.13 | 2.49 | 0.14 | 2.07** | 0.13 | 2.53 | 0.13 | 2.09** | 0.13 |
Happy | 2.78 | 0.11 | 2.44** | 0.11 | 2.87 | 0.12 | 2.4** | 0.10 | 2.84 | 0.12 | 2.6** | 0.12 |
Sad | 1.47 | 0.10 | 1.67 | 0.10 | 1.36 | 0.08 | 2.38** | 0.13 | 1.53 | 0.10 | 1.36 | 0.09 |
Tired | 2.51 | 0.13 | 2.4 | 0.14 | 2.4 | 0.14 | 2.53 | 0.14 | 2.42 | 0.14 | 2.78* | 0.13 |
Caring | 2.47 | 0.12 | 2.42 | 0.12 | 2.51 | 0.11 | 2.31* | 0.12 | 2.6 | 0.11 | 2.4* | 0.12 |
Content | 2.76 | 0.12 | 2.22** | 0.11 | 2.78 | 0.12 | 2.24** | 0.12 | 2.8 | 0.12 | 2.69 | 0.13 |
Gloomy | 1.4 | 0.11 | 1.58 | 0.12 | 1.31 | 0.09 | 2** | 0.13 | 1.53 | 0.12 | 1.51 | 0.11 |
Aroused | 1.58 | 0.09 | 1.96** | 0.13 | 1.78 | 0.10 | 1.31** | 0.07 | 1.62 | 0.12 | 1.53 | 0.11 |
Drowsy | 1.96 | 0.14 | 1.6* | 0.11 | 1.87 | 0.14 | 2.04 | 0.14 | 1.93 | 0.14 | 2.56** | 0.14 |
Grouchy | 1.29 | 0.07 | 1.49 | 0.11 | 1.24 | 0.08 | 1.2 | 0.07 | 1.29 | 0.08 | 1.4 | 0.10 |
Peppy | 2.16 | 0.14 | 2.36 | 0.14 | 2.2 | 0.14 | 1.87** | 0.14 | 2.27 | 0.15 | 1.78** | 0.10 |
Nervous | 1.49 | 0.10 | 2.31** | 0.15 | 1.58 | 0.12 | 1.49 | 0.11 | 1.59 | 0.11 | 1.42 | 0.10 |
Calm | 3.27 | 0.11 | 1.82** | 0.11 | 3.13 | 0.12 | 3.11 | 0.11 | 2.98 | 0.12 | 3.07 | 0.12 |
Loving | 2.62 | 0.14 | 2.16** | 0.14 | 2.58 | 0.14 | 2.53 | 0.13 | 2.58 | 0.14 | 2.31* | 0.15 |
Fedup | 1.4 | 0.10 | 1.73 | 0.14 | 1.47 | 0.13 | 1.4 | 0.11 | 1.38 | 0.10 | 1.96** | 0.15 |
Active | 1.96 | 0.12 | 2.29* | 0.12 | 2.11 | 0.12 | 1.78** | 0.11 | 1.87 | 0.13 | 1.67* | 0.11 |
Worried | 1.31 | 0.10 | 2.09** | 0.13 | 1.38 | 0.10 | 1.58* | 0.11 | 1.44 | 0.10 | 1.29* | 0.08 |
Frightened | 1.11 | 0.05 | 2.22** | 0.14 | 1.09 | 0.04 | 1.18 | 0.07 | 1.09 | 0.07 | 1.14 | 0.03 |
For each emotional condition (fear, sadness, neutral), the psychometric functions were represented by plotting the proportion of long responses [
Fear | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|
BP | WR | |||
SEM | SEM | |||
200/800 |
494 | 34 | 0.20 | 0.05 |
Post-film |
446 | 35 | 0.14 | 0.03 |
Pre-film | 1045 | 38 | 0.17 | 0.05 |
Post-film | 910 | 39 | 0.17 | 0.03 |
Sadness | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|
BP | WR | |||
SD | SD | |||
200/800 |
499 | 27 | 0.14 | 0.03 |
Post-film |
481 | 31 | 0.16 | 0.03 |
Pre-film | 996 | 31 | 0.12 | 0.03 |
Post-film | 964 | 37 | 0.12 | 0.03 |
Neutral | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|
BP | WR | |||
SD | SD | |||
200/800 |
483 | 25 | 0.15 | 0.02 |
Post-film |
462 | 28 | 0.14 | 0.03 |
Pre-film | 949 | 28 | 0.15 | 0.02 |
Post-film | 918 | 31 | 0.20 | 0.03 |
An initial omnibus ANOVA was performed on the BP with duration range as between-subjects factor (200/800 vs. 400/1600) and two within-subjects factors: (1) the bisection task (pre- and post-film) and (2) the emotion (fear, sadness, neutral). The ANOVAs on
For the fear-inducing film (Figure
With regard to the sad film clips, the assessment of mood experience using the BMIS suggested that these films did indeed induce sadness in the participants and reduce their arousal level. However, as Figure
As expected, for the neutral films, the psychometric functions obtained after the neutral films were also similar to those obtained before the neutral films (Figure
We performed the same analyses on the Weber ratio (WR; Table
For the fear-inducing film, in line with the general ANOVA, the ANOVA on the WR showed neither a significant main effect of emotion,
The originality of the present study lies in the fact that it attempts to investigate the effect of mood experience on the time perception of neutral events rather than to investigate the estimation of the duration of emotional events. We therefore showed our participants validated emotional films that lasted for long periods (9 min) in order to modify their general mood. Our results demonstrated that viewing emotional films for periods of several minutes changed the participants’ mood, and that the mood experience may affect the perception of time in a subsequent temporal task. Three types of emotional films were used: frightening, sad, and neutral control films. In line with other studies which have used emotional films (Rottenberg et al.,
Our study showed that the mood of fear produced by the frightening films had a lengthening effect on time perception, with the result that the stimulus durations were judged longer after than before viewing these emotional films. Indeed, our results indicated that the psychometric functions were shifted toward the left in the post-compared to the pre-film bisection tasks, with a significant lowering of the BP being observed. In addition, our results demonstrated that the fear-related effect on the perception of time was not due to simply watching a film, independently of the elicited emotion. Indeed, the neutral films did not affect time perception. In sum, a clear distortion of time was produced by the mood of fear induced by the films. Furthermore, this time distortion was not associated with an impairment of temporal discrimination. Indeed, our findings showed that variability in time discrimination did not change between the experimental conditions as indicated by the fact that the WR values were similar in the different conditions. They also showed that Weber’s law holds whatever the emotional condition, with a constant WR being observed for the different stimulus duration ranges. Overall, these results are entirely consistent with those found in temporal studies using other negative highly arousing emotional stimuli (aversive sounds, faces, pictures; for a recent review, see Droit-Volet,
Unlike the emotion of fear, sadness did not modify time perception in the present bisection task despite the fact that the participants reported being sadder and less aroused after than before viewing the sad films in the BMIS. The mood of sadness is considered to be a low-arousal emotion inducing a slowing down of mental and motor activity (Izard and Ackerman,
This difficulty in finding emotional stimuli that can slow down the internal clock system is due to the fact that human beings are genetically predisposed to produce automatic behavioral reactions rather than to reduce their rate of action when events occur in the environment. The motivation for action is thus one of the main factors explaining the acceleration of the internal clock mechanisms in response to emotion. Time distortions thus indirectly allow us to identify the fundamental adaptive function of emotions (Frijda,
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
This work was supported by the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST; TIMELY) and by a Partner University Fund between France and United-States on Emotion and Time. It was also supported by a grant from the Agence Nationale de la recherche (ANR) Emotion(s), Cognition, Comportement from France.