A Relationship Between Time Perception and State-Anxiety

Abstract

Participants in this study were randomly assigned to one of three interval groups of either one, three, or five minutes. All participants were asked to estimate a group-assigned time interval and complete the state portion of the State Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI). It was hypothesized that higher levels of state anxiety would cause participants to overestimate the passage of time. It was also hypothesized that shorter interval durations would be estimated more accurately than longer interval durations. Results of a t-test did not support the first hypothesis. Results of a linear trend analysis did support the second hypothesis (P < .05). These results indicate that state-anxiety does not cause the passage of time to be overestimated and that interval duration length affects how accurately time is estimated. Implications of this study are important to the understanding of human time-management ability and time estimation errors. KEYWORDS: Time estimation; Perception; State-anxiety; Attention; Working memory; Emotion

Feel the Time. Time Perception as a Function of Interoceptive Processing

“…Moreover, regression analysis also failed to be significant for the audio and video accuracy indexes, suggesting that audio and video time estimation probably referred to different processing circuits, partially distinct from the interoceptive system. These results are supported by recent literature (Mioni et al, 2016 ) according to which time perception in depression showed inconclusive results (Thones and Oberfeld, 2015 ) along with not-inductive time studies in anxiety that also provided mixed results (Lueck, 2007 ; Brown, 2016 ).…”