The Effect Of Threat-Related Emotions On Time Perception

Emotions are powerful drivers of distortions in time perception.Past research has focused on arousal and valence mechanisms of emotion-driven temporal distortions.Recent models have investigated the role of motivation in emotion and its effect on temporal perception.Based on the motivational dimensional model of emotion,emotions differ in motivational direction.That is,some affects are approach motivating and give the impetus to move toward an object,while some affects are withdrawal motivating and give the impetus to move away from an object.The motivation dimension of emotion,valence and arousal are independent of each other.The evidence supporting this view mainly comes from the research results of anger,a negative yet approach-oriented emotion.Fear on the other hand has been traditionally regarded as an avoidance emotion.These two subtypes of threat-related emotions are closely related to social environment and have great value for human survival and development and interpersonal adaptation.Thus,although anger and fear share a ‘negative’valence,high arousal,and threat value,they also appear to be opposed in terms of underlying motivation.Previous studies on the effect of emotion on time perception are inconsistent.Inspired by the theory of emotional motivation dimension,this may reflect the role of motivation.Thus,the present study was to investigate the effects of two threat-related emotions on the judgment of time duration using arousal-controlled emotional stimuli.In experiment 1,emotional faces were used as stimulus.In an in-subject design,30 college students were asked to complete a time comparison task to explore the effect of anger and fear on time perception.The results of variance analysis of motivation showed that,compared with neutral emotions,the subjects felt that anger conveyed approach motivation,while fear conveyed avoidance motivation.In terms of time perception of emotional faces,we found that fearful faces induced significant time overestimation,while angry faces did not induce significant time perception distortion.In Experiment 2,emotional body posture images were used as stimulus materials.In an in-subject design,30 college students were asked to complete a time comparison task to explore the effect of anger and fear on time perception.The results of variance analysis of motivation showed that,compared with neutral emotions,the subjects felt that anger conveyed approach motivation,while fear conveyed avoidance motivation.In terms of time perception of emotional body posture,we found that fear body posture caused significant time overestimation,and anger body posture caused significant time underestimation.The results of Experiment 1 and Experiment 2 basically supported the motivational dimensional model of emotion.Experiment 3 used reading and writing tasks to induce anger and fear,and 18 subjects in the control group(anger,fear and neutral control group)were assigned to complete the time estimation task after emotional induction,and the changes of time perception in anger and fear were investigated.The results showed that,compared with the neutral control group,the anger-induced group reported approach motivation,while the fear-induced group reported avoidance motivation.In the durations of 2s,4s and 6s,compared with the neutral control group,the subjects in the anger-induced group significantly underestimated the time,while those in the fear-induced group significantly overestimated the time.The results of experiment 3 supported the motivational dimensional model of emotion.The above results show that:(1)Motivation of threatening emotion affects time perception.Anger expression conveys close motivation,which leads to time underestimate,while fear expression conveys avoidance motivation,which leads to time overestimate.(2)When individuals were in a threatening emotional state,the change pattern of time perception remained consistent at different time intervals.(3)Both the time perception of objective emotional stimuli and the time perception after emotional state were induced,the influence of motivation was found,which supported the theory of motivation dimension of emotion.