Anxiety
How do anxiety and fear alter our perception of time?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
While being in an anxious state makes people underestimate the passage of time, experiencing acute fear has no measurable effect on time perception.
How this study connects
Role on claims
Each row is a claim on a concept or method page where this paper supports, challenges, or qualifies the statement. Roles are hand-checked — not a model guess.
Not yet placed on a claim. This paper has study layers, but no concept page yet cites it as support, challenge, or qualifier.
Inspect source passages
How do anxiety and fear alter our perception of time?
These passages occur verbatim in the stored paper text. They support the points listed below; they do not verify every statement in the explanation.
five experiments in the study
This hypothesis was tested over the course of five separate experiments.
three experiments included in the anxiety meta-analysis
A meta-analysis was conducted across the three experiments to quantify more precisely the effect of threat on temporal perception ().
Key findings
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.
Methodology
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.
Limitations
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.
Related papers in this topic
Same topic cluster — not a recommendation engine.
- Do socially anxious people see neutral faces as threatening?
- Do socially anxious people look at, then away from, a feared person?
- How do worry and good moments shape anxiety in people with GAD?
- Does Social Anxiety Make Us Over-Interpret What Others Think?
- Do worry and metacognition drive anxiety during therapy?