How do anxiety and fear alter our perception of time?
While being in an anxious state makes people underestimate the passage of time, experiencing acute fear has no measurable effect on time perception.
Source
Anxiety makes time pass quicker while fear has no effect
What they did
Researchers conducted five experiments to test how different negative emotional states affect our perception of time. In three experiments, participants judged the duration of visual stimuli while experiencing anxiety triggered by the unpredictable threat of a mild electric shock. In Experiment 4 and Experiment 5, the researchers triggered acute fear by delivering guaranteed, immediate electric shocks linked to specific visual cues.
What they found
Anxiety consistently caused participants to underestimate time intervals, making the durations feel shorter regardless of whether they actually received physical shocks during the task. In contrast, the fear manipulation did not significantly alter time perception, contradicting earlier research suggesting that acute fear causes people to overestimate time.
The limits
What it doesn't show
The study does not establish whether these findings generalize to non-emotional stimuli, as the experiments used images of emotional faces or fractals. Additionally, the fear manipulation used a highly predictable shock schedule, meaning participants might have quickly habituated to the shocks, which could explain the lack of a significant effect. Finally, the researchers characterized anxiety specifically as a response to unpredictable but known threats, meaning the results might not capture other aspects of clinical anxiety, such as worry over imaginary or completely unknown future events.
Key terms
- temporal bisection task
- A psychological test where participants judge whether a presented stimulus duration is closer to a previously learned short or long anchor duration.
- bisection point
- The specific time interval perceived as exactly halfway between the short and long anchor durations, used to measure shifts in time estimation.
- Weber fraction
- A mathematical index representing a participant's sensory precision and sensitivity to differences between time intervals.
- anxiety
- A prolonged, unpleasant emotional state triggered by anticipating an unpredictable or uncertain threat in the future.
- fear
- An acute, negative emotional state elicited by an immediate, highly certain threat.
- threat of shock
- An experimental technique used to induce anxiety by warning participants they may receive random, unpredictable electric shocks.
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Quiz yourself
How does the study conceptually distinguish fear from anxiety regarding threat characteristics?
Common questions
Why does anxiety make time feel like it is passing faster?
According to attentional models, anxiety divides your mental resources. Because your attention is split between the immediate timing task and worrying about an unpredictable future threat, your brain misses internal tracking cues, making the interval feel shorter than it actually is.
Did the physical pain of the shocks cause the timing distortion?
No. The researchers ran an experiment where participants anticipated shocks but never actually received them, and they still underestimated the time. This proves that the psychological anticipation of threat, rather than the shock itself, drives the distortion.
Why didn't fear cause participants to overestimate time as predicted?
The researchers suggest participants may have quickly habituated to the highly predictable shocks in the fear experiments. Alternatively, the cognitive mechanisms that process acute, certain fear may simply affect our attention differently than the lingering uncertainty of anxiety.
Does the type of visual stimulus timed change this effect?
Surprisingly, no. Although the researchers presented participants with happy, fearful, and neutral facial expressions to time, the emotional content of the faces had no significant impact on how time was perceived under anxiety.
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