Anxiety makes time pass quicker while fear has no effect. Sarigiannidis, I., Grillon, C., Ernst, M., Roiser, J. P., & Robinson, O. J. Cognition, 197:104116, April, 2020. Place: Netherlands
doi  abstract   bibtex   
People often say that during unpleasant events, e.g. traumatic incidents such as car accidents, time slows down (i.e. time is overestimated). However aversive events can elicit at least two dissociable subtypes of reactions: fear (transient and relating to an imminent event) and anxiety (diffuse and relating to an unpredictable event). We hypothesised that anxiety might have an opposite effect on time perception compared to fear. To test this we combined a robust anxiety manipulation (threat-of-shock) with a widely used timing task in which participants judged whether the duration of a stimulus was long or short. In line with our hypothesis, across three experiments (with varying stimulus timings and shock levels), participants significantly underestimated time under inducted anxiety, as indicated by a rightward shift of the psychophysical function (meta-analytic effect size: d = 0.68, 95% confidence interval: 0.42-0.94). In two further studies, we were unable to replicate previous findings that fear leads to time overestimation, after adapting our temporal cognition task, which suggests a dissociation between fear and anxiety on how they affect time perception. Our results suggest that experimentally inducing anxiety leads to underestimating the duration of temporal intervals, which might be a starting point in explaining different subjective experiences of disorders related to fear (e.g. post-traumatic stress disorder) and anxiety (e.g. generalised anxiety disorder).
@article{sarigiannidis_anxiety_2020,
	title = {Anxiety makes time pass quicker while fear has no effect.},
	volume = {197},
	copyright = {Copyright © 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.},
	issn = {1873-7838 0010-0277},
	doi = {10.1016/j.cognition.2019.104116},
	abstract = {People often say that during unpleasant events, e.g. traumatic incidents such as car accidents, time slows down (i.e. time is overestimated). However aversive  events can elicit at least two dissociable subtypes of reactions: fear (transient  and relating to an imminent event) and anxiety (diffuse and relating to an  unpredictable event). We hypothesised that anxiety might have an opposite effect  on time perception compared to fear. To test this we combined a robust anxiety  manipulation (threat-of-shock) with a widely used timing task in which  participants judged whether the duration of a stimulus was long or short. In line  with our hypothesis, across three experiments (with varying stimulus timings and  shock levels), participants significantly underestimated time under inducted  anxiety, as indicated by a rightward shift of the psychophysical function  (meta-analytic effect size: d = 0.68, 95\% confidence interval: 0.42-0.94). In two  further studies, we were unable to replicate previous findings that fear leads to  time overestimation, after adapting our temporal cognition task, which suggests a  dissociation between fear and anxiety on how they affect time perception. Our  results suggest that experimentally inducing anxiety leads to underestimating the  duration of temporal intervals, which might be a starting point in explaining  different subjective experiences of disorders related to fear (e.g.  post-traumatic stress disorder) and anxiety (e.g. generalised anxiety disorder).},
	language = {eng},
	journal = {Cognition},
	author = {Sarigiannidis, Ioannis and Grillon, Christian and Ernst, Monique and Roiser, Jonathan P. and Robinson, Oliver J.},
	month = apr,
	year = {2020},
	pmid = {31883966},
	pmcid = {PMC7033556},
	note = {Place: Netherlands},
	keywords = {*Fear, *Time Perception, Anxiety, Anxiety Disorders, Cognition, Emotion, Fear, Humans, Threat-of-shock, Time perception},
	pages = {104116},
}

Downloads: 0