The duration of disgusted and fearful faces is judged longer and shorter than that of neutral faces: the attention-related time distortions as revealed by behavioral and electrophysiological measurements

Abstract

Time perception has been shown to be altered by emotions. This study employed event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine the effects of two threat-related emotions on the judgment of time intervals in the range of 490–910 ms. We demonstrated that disgust and fear have distinct influences on time perception. At the behavioral level, disgusted faces were estimated longer and fearful faces were estimated shorter (i.e., the generalization gradient for the disgusted faces was shifted left while the generalization gradient for the fearful faces was shifted right) when compared with neutral faces. Accordingly, the contingent negative variation, an online ERP index of timing, displayed larger area in disgust and smaller area in fear conditions when compared with neutral condition (disgust = 1.94 ± 2.35 μV•s, neutral = 1.40 ± 2.5 μV•s, and fear = 1.00 ± 2.26 μV•s). These findings indicated that specific neural mechanisms may underlie the attention effects of different subtypes of threat-related emotions on timing; compared with neutral faces, fearful faces are likely to attract more attentional resources while disgusted faces may attract less attentional resources for emotional processing. The major contribution of the current study is to provide neural correlates of fear vs. disgust divergence in the aspect of time perception and to demonstrate beyond the behavioral level that the categorization of threat-related emotions should be refined so to highlight the adaptability of the human defense system.

Negative emotional state slows down movement speed: behavioral and neural evidence

“…The interference on movement speed can be explained as a reduced availability of cognitive resources (Fredrickson, 2015; Melcher et al, 2012; Van der Stigchel, Imants & Ridderinkhof, 2011), thus disturbing the action task. People are very sensitive to negative stimuli (Lu et al, 2015; Yuan et al, 2007), with negative stimuli being more likely to attract people’s attention and thus more likely to be encoded well (Zhang et al, 2014). Attentional blink is a phenomenon wherein people tend to devote more attention to the first stimulus than the second when two stimuli are presented in series.…”

The Role of Emotion Regulation in Reducing Emotional Distortions of Duration Perception

“…Duration perception refers to one’s perception of the interval between two successive events or the duration of an event ( Fraisse, 1984 ). The perception of duration is essential for both survival and the completion of everyday activities ( Zhang et al, 2014 ). It can be distorted through numerous factors, such as age, mental status, and sensory channel.…”

Women Overestimate Temporal Duration: Evidence from Chinese Emotional Words

“…We did not completely rule out a memory difference between the sexes for the results. In both two experiments, all participants reached 100% accuracy in their performance of training 2 phase before starting the test session and standard stimuli were presented five times each at the beginning of each block to prevent participants from forgetting them, which are consistent with numerous previous studies (e.g., Gan et al, 2009; Zhang et al, 2014b; Droit-Volet et al, 2015). However, the former just can suggest that, in some way, there are no difference between subjects’ resolving ability for the standard durations (i.e., 400 and 1600 ms), and the latter can’t discriminate different memory ability for men and women.…”

“…This difference may be explainable by sex differences in the brain structure and some physiological features. Finally, for future research, it would be worth investigating whether these effects are dependent on a more detailed classification of emotional words, because some evidence from the literature has indicated that even though the emotional stimuli employed belong to the same category (e.g., fear vs. disgust, both representing threat-related emotions; Zhang et al, 2014b), they have distinct influences on temporal perception. In other words, the impact of the content of experimental material also plays a key role (Gil and Droit-Volet, 2012).…”

“…In the recent decade, a large number of studies have revealed the effects of emotion on temporal perception to varying degrees, by employing facial expressions (Droit-Volet et al, 2004; Zhang et al, 2014b; Li and Yuen, 2015), emotional situations (Lui et al, 2011; Gil and Droit-Volet, 2012; Grondin et al, 2014), musical emotions (Noulhiane et al, 2007; Smith et al, 2011; Droit-Volet et al, 2013; Schirmer et al, 2016), bodily expressions (Droit-Volet and Gil, 2015), and even emotional colors (Shibasaki and Masataka, 2014) or odors (Millot et al, 2016; Yue et al, 2016). It should be noted that the evidence is positioned within the perspectives in models of scalar expectancy theory, which identify the requirement of an arousal-attention mechanism to interpret such an emotional time distortion effect (Gibbon, 1977; Gibbon et al, 1984).…”