Previous research has extensively examined the impact of physical properties of stimulus on time perception, highlighting the inherently subjective nature of time perception and its susceptibility to influences of the emotional content. The present study investigated the effects of emotional valence and arousal in visual stimuli on perceived duration, as well as the potential moderating role of individual differences in the personality dimension of neuroticism. We hypothesized that participants would overestimate the presentation duration of low-valence (negative emotion) and high-arousal stimuli relative to high-valence (positive emotion) and low-arousal stimuli. A two-interval discrimination paradigm employing the method of constant stimuli was used, in which participants compared the presentation duration of a picture with a fixed interval to another picture with systematically varied durations. Stimuli in Experiment 1 were varied in arousal level while stimuli in Experiment 2 were varied in emotional valence. Participants completed a two-alternative forced choice (2AFC) task to judge which stimulus in each trial appeared to last longer, followed by an assessment of neuroticism trait using the neuroticism subscale of the Big Five Inventory. Preliminary results reported a temporal overestimation for high-arousal and negative stimuli, and suggested possible trends between neuroticism and temporal distortion across emotional stimuli. Overall, the findings align with the attention-based and arousal-based internal clock model of time perception, suggesting that high-arousal and negative emotional content may heighten attentional focus on the stimulus, thus accelerating the pacemaker rate and increasing pulse accumulation, resulting in a subjective experience of expanded time.

Authors:
Ricky K. C. Au, Hong Kong Metropolitan University, Hong Kong
Alvin K. M. Tang, Hong Kong Metropolitan University, Hong Kong

About the Presenter(s)
Dr. Ricky K. C. Au is currently a Senior Lecturer of Psychology at the School of Arts and Social Sciences, Hong Kong Metropolitan University, Hong Kong, China.

Connect on ResearchGate
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ricky-K-C-Au-2

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