An Experimental Study On The Effect Of Social Emotions On Time Perception Among College Students

Social emotions are the emotions experienced and expressed by individuals in social activities and social interactions,which are the catalyst of interpersonal interactions and the source of social development.Unlike individual emotional experiences,social emotions emphasize more on the emotional communication between individuals and individuals and between individuals and society.Time is one of the fundamental dimensions of life,and all biological activities are inseparable from time,and the perceived duration of time is crucial to the survival of organisms.A significant number of research have been conducted to investigate the impact of emotions on time perception.How will social emotions,which are differentiated from basic emotions,affect individuals’ perception of time? In this study,two aspects of social relationship emotions and social evaluation emotions were experimentally investigated separately.The first research investigated the effect of socially relevant emotions on temporal perception,using socially informative face pictures as experimental materials,focusing on the uniqueness of infant faces,conducting an experimental study on calm face and sad face conditions,exploring the characteristics of temporal distance perception of infant faces compared to adult faces by college students and examining gender differences.The mediating effect of emotional arousal between face attractiveness and temporal distance perception was analyzed.In the second research,the effect of socially evaluated emotions on temporal perception was experimentally investigated by using words with the function of conveying emotional information as experimental materials.Using a duration bisection task,we examined the temporal differences in college students’ perceptions of immoral behavior phrases,disgusting behavior phrases,and neutral behavior phrases.After that,we explored possible influences using the Prosocial Tendencies Measure and the Moral Foundation Questionnaire.The study’s findings were as follows.(1)The first research found through experimental research that the characteristics of college students’ time perceptions of infant and adult faces differed regardless of whether they were calm or sad faces,as evidenced by the fact that in the calm face condition,participants’ subjective durations of newborn faces were shorter than those of adult faces,with no gender differences.Male and female perceptions of newborn faces differed significantly in the crying face condition,with females tending to perceive crying infant faces to be presented longer compared to crying adult faces,while there was no significant difference between male subjects’ perceptions of crying adult or infant faces.(2)The second research set two experiments,and the experimental results showed that compared to neutral behavioral phrases,college students’ temporal perception of immoral behavioral phrases showed a lengthened effect.When disgusting behavioral phrases with the same level of pleasure and arousal were set up,subjects’ temporal duration of immoral behavioral phrases still showed a significant overestimation,and the degree of it showed a moderate correlation with the anonymity dimension of Prosocial Tendencies Measure.However,unlike other studies that used pictures to explore the difference between the temporal perception of disgusting emotional stimuli and neutral stimuli,the current study’s findings revealed no significant difference in the time perception of nasty and neutral textual stimuli.In summary,this study concludes that both social relationship emotions and social evaluation emotions influence individuals’ subjective temporal judgments,and that the mechanisms of the influence are different.In terms of social relations emotions,college students are attracted to the cute faces of babies when they are confronted with them,while babies are crying,women have stronger emotional reactions and behavioural impulses compared to men.It is necessary to develop empathy and cognitive teaching according to the different characteristics of men and women.In terms of socially evaluated emotions,immoral words can evoke moral emotions in students,which can lead to behavioural tendencies and are related to the individual’s pro-social tendencies,so it is important to focus on the cultivation of pro-social tendencies in moral education.