The influence of social stress on time perception and psychophysiological reactivity

Abstract

Time perception is a fundamental component of everyday life. Although time can be measured using standard units, the relationship between an individual’s experience of perceived time and a standard unit is highly sensitive to context. Stressful and threatening stimuli have been previously shown to produce time distortion effects, such that individuals perceive the stimuli as lasting for different amounts of time as compared to a standard unit. As a highly social species, humans are acutely sensitive to social stressors; however, time distortion effects have not been studied in the context of social stress. We collected psychophysiological (electrocardiogram and impedance cardiography) and time perception data before, during, and after a modified version of the Trier Social Stress Test for 42 participants. Based on prior theories and evidence from the time perception literature, we hypothesized that experiencing a stressful event would result in time distortion. This hypothesis was supported by the data, with individuals on average reproducing short and long duration negative and positive stimuli as lasting longer after experiencing social stress, t(41) = −3.55, p = .001, and t(41) = −4.12, p <.001 for negative stimuli, and t(41)5 −2.43, p = .02, and t(41) = −3.07, p = .004 for positive stimuli. However, changes in time perception were largely unrelated to psychophysiological reactivity to social stress. These findings are in line with some other studies of time distortion, and provide evidence for the interoceptive salience model of time perception. Implications for mechanisms of time distortion are discussed.

The relationship between pain-induced autonomic arousal and perceived duration.

“…This theory therefore suggests that arousal originating from a different sense to the to-be-timed stimulus may have less capacity to modulate time processing in other modalities. This suggestion is supported by the observation that emotional distortions to time are often observed in studies where duration and emotion are presented in the same modality (Droit-Volet et al, 2011) but absent or inconsistent in studies in which they are presented in different modalities (Ogden et al, 2015;van Hedger et al, 2017).…”

Sympathetic involvement in time-constrained sequential foraging

“…Such a link would be supported by recent perceived duration studies reporting a specific association between sympathetic activation and the overestimation of the duration of a painful stimulus (electro-cutaneous stimulation; Piovesan, Mirams, Poole, Moore, & Ogden, 2018). In addition, the association between sympathetic activation and duration overestimation appears to be specific to adaptive events of negative valence, for example, reporting the duration of the presentation of a high-arousal, negative-valence image (a mutilated body) versus a neutral or positive image (Ogden, Henderson, McGlone, & Richter, 2019;van Hedger, Necka, Barakzai, & Norman, 2017). The role of sympathetic activation in learning may therefore further be adaptive, primarily showing associations with environmental deterioration.…”

Time distortion under threat: Sympathetic arousal predicts time distortion only in the context of negative, highly arousing stimuli

“…Critically, the bottom-up relationship between arousal and perceived duration proposed in these models implies that any increase in physiological arousal should subjectively lengthen perceived duration and any reduction in physiological arousal should subjectively shorten perceived duration. However, recent studies directly testing the relationship between physiological arousal (SNS and PSNS reactivity) and emotional distortions to time, have failed to demonstrate this universally for all types of emotional stimuli [29, 30].…”