Several COVID-19 studies on the felt passage of time have been conducted due to the strong feeling of time distortion many people have experienced during the pandemic. Overall, a relative decelaration of time passage was generally associated with negative affect and social isolation; a relative acceleration was associated with an increase in routine in daily life. There is some variability in results depending on the country of study and COVID-19 restrictions introduced, participants’ demographics, and questionnaire items applied. Here we present a study conducted in May 2021 in Germany including n = 500 participants to assess time perception, emotional reactions, and attitudes towards the countermeasures. The passage of time judgments (POTJ) for the preceding 12 months during the pandemic were compared to data addressing the same question posed in previous studies conducted before the outbreak of COVID-19. The previous year was rated as having passed relatively slower during the pandemic compared to the ratings from before the pandemic. The duration judgments (DJ) of the 14 months since the start of the pandemic showed a bimodal distribution with both relatively shorter and relatively longer DJs. Higher levels of several negative emotions, as well as less social satisfaction, were associated with prolonged DJs and partially slower POTJs. Fear for health was not linked with the subjective experience of time, but exploratory analyses suggested that higher levels of fear were linked to more positive evaluations and approval of the governmental countermeasures. Those who reported higher levels of negative, agitated-aggressive emotions showed lower levels of consent with these measures.

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Previous research has shown that judgments of the experienced velocity of recent years passing by vary depending on the number of autobiographical memories being activated in the moment of judging. While a body of evidence shows affect to have an impact on both prospective and retrospective judgments on the experience of time for short periods, the effect of valence of memories on the experience of the passage of long intervals has not been examined yet. Thus, we asked 282 people to retrieve five either emotionally positive or negative memories from the last 5years before judging the subjectively experienced passage of time of these years. However, positive and negative events differ in some ways beyond valence, e.g., the ascribed impact on the participants’ subsequent lives as well as the stability of ascribed affective intensity: The latter decreased over time for negative but not for positive memories while ascribed impact was markedly higher for positive memories. Results indicate no significant differences between the two conditions, even after controlling for the aforementioned differences. However, exploratory analyses show that participants rate time to have passed faster, the longer the activated memories dated back on average, a result that seems in line with contextual-change hypothesis.

In current research, variations in retrospective passage of time judgments for long intervals are commonly attributed to differences regarding the number of experiences in these intervals or the accessibility of the respective memories. This seems to imply the assumption of a covert retrieval, where authors presume that memories from the respective interval influence the experience of time without these memories being explicitly activated when judging. However, no studies have systematically investigated the relation between the experience of time and the respective experiences and memories. To this end, we analyzed data from three studies in which participants judged the passage of the last 5 years either before being asked to select outstanding life events from a list (Studies 1a and b; N = 293 and 263) or before recalling as many meaningful personal memories as were spontaneously accessible (Study 2; N = 262). Despite applying a statistically powerful trial-by-trial mixed-effects modeling approach, neither in the separate datasets nor in the combined dataset, passage of time judgments were predicted by the number of reported events or memories. This suggests that people's spontaneous judgments of the passage of multiannual intervals are not necessarily affected by a covert retrieval of memories from the respective period.

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