Women Overestimate Temporal Duration: Evidence from Chinese Emotional Words

Abstract

Numerous studies have proven the effect of emotion on temporal perception, using various emotional stimuli. However, research investigating this issue from the lexico-semantic perspective and gender difference remains scarce. In this study, participants were presented with different types of emotional words designed in classic temporal bisection tasks. In Experiment 1 where the arousal level of emotional words was controlled, no pure effect of valence on temporal perception was found; however, we observed the overestimation of women relative to men. Furthermore, in Experiment 2, an orthogonal design of valence and arousal with neutral condition was employed to study the arousal-mechanism of temporal distortion effect and its difference between genders. The results showed that the gender difference observed in Experiment 1 was robust and was not influenced by valence and arousal. Taken together, our findings suggest a stable gender difference in the temporal perception of semantic stimuli, which might be related to some intrinsic properties of linguistic stimuli and sex differences in brain structure as well as physiological features. The automatic processing of time information was also discussed.

Temporal Processing of Joyful and Disgusting Food Pictures by Women With an Eating Disorder

“…Over the years, a variety of stimuli have been used to elicit emotions in time perception studies: facial expressions ( Effron et al, 2006 ; Gil et al, 2007 ; Gan et al, 2009 ; Tipples et al, 2015 ; Mioni et al, 2016a ), music pieces ( Bisson et al, 2009 ; Droit-Volet et al, 2010 , 2013 ), video sequences ( Droit-Volet et al, 2011 ; Grondin et al, 2014a ), sounds ( Noulhiane et al, 2007 ; Mioni et al, 2017 ), words ( Zhang et al, 2017 ), images of mutilated bodies ( Grondin et al, 2014b ), phobic objects ( Watts and Sharrock, 1984 ; Buetti and Lleras, 2012 ; Tipples, 2015 ) and real-life scenes ( Lambrechts et al, 2011 ). Gil et al (2009) first used food pictures to test the effect of disgust and pleasure on time perception.…”

“Time Slows Down Whenever You Are Around” for Women but Not for Men

“…Therefore, they tend to perceive the received stimulus information as larger and remember the event as being longer. Besides that, a study conducted by Zhang et al (2017) showed a reliable sex differences in temporal distortion with an emotional stimulus. Women, compared to men, tended to overestimate the durations of emotional words.…”

“…There are some factors studied involved in time perception accuracy, such as emotion ( Droit-Volet and Meck, 2007 ; Droit-Volet et al, 2011 ; Zhang et al, 2017 ), arousal ( Schwarz et al, 2013 ), alcohol ( Ogden et al, 2011 ) attention ( Gibbon et al, 1984 ; Zakay and Block, 1996 ; Brown, 2008 ) and memory ( Brown, 1997 ; Staddon, 2005 ). An important variable that determines duration estimates is the cognitive load, that is, how cognitively demanding a task is ( Block et al, 2010 ; Guo et al, 2019 ).…”

O papel da emoção na percepção de tempo

“…Por outro lado, nos últimos anos também se verificou o aumento das críticas ao MOA e o surgimento de propostas alternativas (princípio do processamento e modelo bottom-up/top-down), que necessitam ser melhor investigadas no futuro próximo. Nesta direção, é preciso compreender melhor a influência do sexo (Zhang et al, 2017*) e da idade (Gros et al, 2015*), bem como de estímulos socialmente relevantes (Kliegl, Limbrecht-Ecklundt, Dürr, Traue, & Huckauf, 2015*), sobre a percepção de tempo sob influência emocional. Outra perspectiva que merece atenção nos próximos anos é a modelagem Bayesiana, que se mostrou muito eficiente para o cálculo de estimativas temporais mais acuradas (Tipples, 2019*).…”