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.
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.
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