Automatic Suppression Reduces Anxiety-Related Overestimation of Time Perception

Abstract

Anxiety has been found to lengthen time perception, especially the time perception of negative stimuli. This anxiety-related time overestimation is thought to be mainly associated with massively increased arousal. Suppression, which can be achieved either deliberately or automatically, has been demonstrated to be effective in reducing arousal. Consequently, the present study explored the effectiveness of both deliberate suppression (Experiment 1) and automatic suppression (Experiment 2) in reducing the time distortion in anxiety. A temporal bisection task (TBT), featuring negative and neutral pictures, was used to measure time perception, while the self-reported arousal was used to assess arousal. The deliberate suppression was manipulated by asking participants to suppress their emotional expressions; while automatic suppression was manipulated through a sentence-unscrambling task featuring suppression-related words, which can unconsciously prime suppression. The results of Experiment 1 showed that deliberate suppression did not reduce the anxiety-related time overestimation and arousal. However, Experiment 2 showed that automatic suppression significantly reduced the anxiety-related time overestimation, with significant arousal reduction being observed. In conclusion, automatic suppression, but not deliberate suppression, is effective for reducing the effect of anxiety on time perception.

How Facial Attractiveness Affects Time Perception: Increased Arousal Results in Temporal Dilation of Attractive Faces

“…Importantly, as hypothesized (Hypothesis 2), the results of mediating analysis of arousal on temporal dilation indicated that the decrease of arousal mediates the attenuation of temporal dilation in attractive faces, suggesting that the manipulation of automatic expression suppression decreases the arousal and consequently attenuates the temporal dilation of attractive faces. This finding is similar to previous investigation concerning emotional temporal dilation (Mella et al, 2011) or anxietyrelated temporal dilation (Yuan et al, 2020), providing empirical evidence that the attenuation of temporal dilation was associated with the downregulation of arousal.…”

“…In the dominant theoretical accounts, PA models assumed that the time perception is determined according to the number of pulses generated by a pacemaker and counted by an accumulator through a switch/gate (Treisman, 1963;Church, 1984;Gibbon et al, 1984). Based on PA models, the pacemaker rate is usually conceptualized as arousal (Lake et al, 2016;Zhang et al, 2017;Li and Tian, 2020;Yuan et al, 2020), with an increase in arousal equivalent to an increase in the pacemaker rate. This increase in the pacemaker rate results in a greater number of pulses during the timing of a specific event and eventually led to temporal dilation.…”

“…For the experimental group, there were 20 sentences each included an "emotion suppression" term; for the control group, there were 20 sentences each included a "passively perceiving" term (see Figure 4). These terms were selected from a previous study (Yuan et al, 2020), and were effective in priming suppression and passively perceiving.…”

“…At the end of Experiment 2, participants were required to complete a funneled debriefing procedure, which is similar to previous studies (Chartrand and Bargh, 1996;Bargh and Chartrand, 2000;Williams et al, 2009;Yuan et al, 2020). They were asked (1) whether they had ever seen or completed a sentence-unscrambling task for another experiment, ( 2) what they thought about the purpose of the sentence-unscrambling task, and (3) whether and what they thought that the sentenceunscrambling task and the temporal reproduction task had been related.…”

“…Meanwhile, a self-reported 9-point scale was adopted to assess the facial attractiveness and arousal of each face. A sentence-unscrambling task that features suppression-related words (Mauss et al, 2007b;Yang et al, 2014;Yuan et al, 2020) was used to prime automatic expression suppression. As both physical and psychological gender have been found to have impacts on facial attractiveness (Samson and Janssen, 2014;Tian et al, 2019), all stimuli were female faces.…”