Opinion
Cognitive-emotional interactions
How emotions colour our perception of time

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2007.09.008Get rights and content

Our sense of time is altered by our emotions to such an extent that time seems to fly when we are having fun and drags when we are bored. Recent studies using standardized emotional material provide a unique opportunity for understanding the neurocognitive mechanisms that underlie the effects of emotion on timing and time perception in the milliseconds-to-hours range. We outline how these new findings can be explained within the framework of internal-clock models and describe how emotional arousal and valence interact to produce both increases and decreases in attentional time sharing and clock speed. The study of time and emotion is at a crossroads, and we outline possible examples for future directions.

Introduction

Time and emotion are inextricably linked by the rhythm and tempo of a myriad of external and internal events, which comprise music, film, dance, sports, courtship, social conflict and everyday activities. Although many studies have shown that humans, like other animals, are able to measure the passage of time accurately in the milliseconds-to-hours range, how our sense of time is altered by our emotions is not well understood 1, 2, 3. As far back as 1890, William James wrote: ‘our feeling of time harmonizes with different mental moods’ and inquired as ‘to what cerebral process is the sense of time due?’ [4]. More recently, Paul Fraisse has argued that timing and time perception not only involve cognition but are also intimately connected to our emotional life [5]. However, whereas the investigation of emotion-related topics is growing rapidly 6, 7, analysis of the complex interplay between emotion and interval timing remains relatively rare [8]. Furthermore, the pioneering studies on time and emotion have frequently used nonstandardized emotional stimuli, which make their findings inconsistent and difficult to interpret 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15. However, several recent studies have used standardized emotional material, which has allowed us to gain a better understanding of the psychological mechanisms underlying time distortions in response to emotion. This article discusses the results of these new studies and integrates them with internal-clock models of interval timing (Box 1).

Section snippets

Explanations of time distortions within the context of internal-clock models

Inspection of internal-clock models (Box 1) suggests that variations in our feeling of prospective time are caused by different mechanisms – attentional time sharing, clock speed and memory distortion – occurring at different levels of the processing of temporal information. It has been proposed that these different mechanisms result in distinct patterns of timing behavior 1, 2, 16, 17.

There is now ample evidence to indicate that when non-temporal and/or emotional events capture attention,

The effect of emotional stimuli (sounds and pictures) rated for valence and arousal on timing and time perception

As mentioned earlier, a consistent picture of the effects of emotion on time perception has been difficult to discern, in part because most early studies used idiosyncratic emotional stimuli, causing problems for interpretation and generalization. Recently, several studies have examined this issue using standardized stimulus sets, such as the International Affective Digital Sounds system (IADS) [31] and the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) [32]. We focus on these studies here, with

Time and facial expression

Faces are often used in studies on emotions, because perceiving other people's emotional states is essential for the determination of appropriate behavior in social interactions [45]. Droit-Volet et al.[40] investigated how the perception of facial expressions of emotion affects our experience of time by using the duration bisection task 46, 47. In this task, participants were trained to discriminate between two standard durations, that is a short (400 ms) and a long duration (1600 ms), presented

Time and embodied emotion

How can the perception of an emotion, such as anger, expressed by another individual accelerate our internal clock? The expression of an emotion might elicit a different emotion in an observer. For example, an expression of anger is more likely to elicit fear than anger in the observer [53]. Consequently, it might be fear, not simply the perception of anger, that increases clock speed. However, various lines of evidence indicate that there is a close connection between the neural substrates of

Concluding remarks

Our review of the literature on the effect of emotions on timing and time perception reveals that our feeling for time is fundamentally inseparable from our subjective experience of the environment. Time can be distorted to appear shorter or longer than it really is. For example, it seems to fly when we are with our lover and drag when our partner is terribly boring. Consequently, the direction of temporal distortions as well as their magnitude might be important clues helping us to gain a

Acknowledgements

We thank Cindy Lustig, John Wearden, and four anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on earlier versions of the manuscript. Support was provided from Prosodie ACI Grant PRO-0052, Ministère de la recherche, France and the National Institutes of Health, USA.

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