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Abstract

The present study explored the effect of vocally expressed emotions on duration perception. Recordings of the syllable ‘ah’ spoken in a disgusted (negative), surprised (positive), and neutral voice were subjected to a compression/stretching algorithm producing seven durations ranging from 300 to 1200 ms. The resulting stimuli served in a duration bisection procedure in which participants indicated whether a stimulus was more similar in duration to a previously studied 300 ms (short) or 1200 ms (long) 440 Hz tone. Behavioural results indicate that disgusted expressions were perceived as shorter than surprised expressions in both men and women and this effect was related to perceived valence. Additionally, both emotional expressions were perceived as shorter than neutral expressions in women only and this effect was related to perceived arousal. Event-related potentials showed an influence of emotion and rate of acoustic change (fast for compressed/short and slow for stretched/long stimuli) on stimulus encoding in women only. Based on these findings, we suggest that emotions interfere with temporal processes and facilitate the influence of contextual information (e.g., rate of acoustic change, attention) on duration judgements. Because women are more sensitive than men to unattended vocal emotions, their temporal judgements are more strongly distorted.

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... One typical finding is the temporal overestimation of emotional compared to neutral stimuli that has been reported for emotional sounds (Mella et al., 2011;Noulhiane et al., 2007), for emotional pictures (Angrilli et al., 1997;Buetti, & Lleras, 2012;Gil & Droit-Volet, 2012b;Grommet et al., 2011;Kliegl et al., 2015a), as well as for emotional videos (Loftus et al., 1987). However, some studies replicated the temporal overestimation of emotional stimuli only in certain experimental conditions or even showed temporal underestimation of emotional stimuli (Eberhardt et al., 2016;Gil & Droit-Volet, 2012a;Schirmer et al., 2016). In order to explain the respective heterogeneous results, specific stimulus characteristics like stimulus modality (Schirmer et al., 2016), as well as stimulus valence and arousal have been discussed (e.g., Angrilli et al., 1997;Droit-Volet & Meck, 2007;Gil & Droit-Volet, 2012a, b;Kliegl et al., 2015a). ...
... However, some studies replicated the temporal overestimation of emotional stimuli only in certain experimental conditions or even showed temporal underestimation of emotional stimuli (Eberhardt et al., 2016;Gil & Droit-Volet, 2012a;Schirmer et al., 2016). In order to explain the respective heterogeneous results, specific stimulus characteristics like stimulus modality (Schirmer et al., 2016), as well as stimulus valence and arousal have been discussed (e.g., Angrilli et al., 1997;Droit-Volet & Meck, 2007;Gil & Droit-Volet, 2012a, b;Kliegl et al., 2015a). For example, Kliegl et al. (2015a) showed in their first experiment that Landolt rings emotionally conditioned with negatively rated pictures and inducing high arousal were rated to subjectively last longer than the physically identical Landolt rings that were previously paired with neutral pictures eliciting low levels of arousal. ...
... Especially when aiming at recording timing signatures at different stages of information processing like analysis of emotional stimulus content or stimulus comparison at the decision stage, electroencephalography (EEG) seems very promising, because of its precise temporal resolution in the range of milliseconds (Rugg & Coles, 1995). In a recent study in the auditory domain, Schirmer et al. (2016) investigated temporal distortions evoked by emotional voices in a temporal bisection task and recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) in order to reveal interactions of emotion and time processing at an early encoding stage as well as to explore temporal decision-making at the last stage by generating separate ERPs for long and short responses. Thus, besides behavioral temporal ratings, a relatively early positive deflection about 200 ms after stimulus onset (P2) and a later negative potential peaking about 400 ms following stimulus onset (N4) were observed. ...
Article
Emotional stimuli like emotional faces have been frequently shown to be temporally overestimated compared to neutral ones. This effect has been commonly explained by induced arousal caused by emotional processing leading to the acceleration of an inner-clock-like pacemaker. However, there are some studies reporting contradictory effects and others point to relevant moderating variables. Given this controversy, we aimed at investigating the processes underlying the temporal overestimation of emotional faces by combining behavioral and electrophysiological correlates in a temporal bisection task. We assessed duration estimation of angry and neutral faces using anchor durations of 400 ms and 1600 ms while recording event-related potentials. Subjective ratings and the early posterior negativity confirmed encoding and processing of stimuli’s emotionality. However, temporal ratings did not differ between angry and neutral faces. In line with this behavioral result, the Contingent Negative Variation (CNV), an electrophysiological index of temporal accumulation, was not modulated by the faces’ emotionality. Duration estimates, i.e., short or long responses toward stimuli of ambiguous durations of 1000 ms, were nevertheless associated with a differential CNV amplitude. Interestingly, CNV modulation was already observed at 600–700 ms after stimulus onset, i.e., long before stimulus offset. The results are discussed in light of the information-processing model of time perception as well as regarding possible factors of the experimental setup moderating temporal overestimation of emotional stimuli. In sum, combining behavioral and electrophysiological measures seems promising to more clearly understand the complex processes leading to the illusion of temporal lengthening of emotional faces.
... Besides visual stimuli, auditory stimuli can also contribute to the modula- tion of our emotional state in everyday life. However, only a small number of studies has been conducted to investigate the effect of spoken emotional words on time perception (Droit-Volet et al., 2010;Fallow & Voyer, 2013;Mella et al. (2010); Noulhiane et al., 2007;Schirmer et al., 2016;Voyer & Reuangrith, 2015). Mella et al. (2010), Noulhiane et al. (2007) and Wackerman et al. (2014) used sounds from the International Affective Digitalized Sounds System (IADS; Bradley & Lang, 1999). ...
... This stands in contrast with the previous studies on the subject, which measured filled interval timing: they varied durations by stretching or contracting the pronuncia- tion of words for marking (filled) intervals. Moreover, an issue of interest was the gender of the participants; men and women occasionally differ when judging the duration of potentially arousing sound stimuli (i.e., Grassi, 2010) and women are more sensitive than men to vocal expressions ( Schirmer et al., 2016). This poten- tial gender effect was investigated by taking into account the gender of the voice used for pronouncing the words. ...
... Fallow and Voyer (2013) showed that the duration of angry audi- tory stimuli was more often categorized as "short" as compared to the duration of the same stimulus spoken in a neutral voice. Moreover, Schirmer et al. (2016) also showed that negative expressions were perceived as shorter than positive expres- sions in both male and female participants. Importantly, in both Fallow and Voyer (2013) and Schirmer et al. (2016), the authors used only one auditory stimulus and modified the intonation (in Fallow and Voyer, the word 'bower' spoken with angry or neutral tone; in Schirmer et al. (2016) the syllable 'ah' spoken with dis- gusted/negative, surprised/positive and neutral intonations). ...
Article
The aim of the present study was to investigate the influence of the emotional content of words marking brief intervals on the perceived duration of these intervals. Three independent variables were of interest: the gender of the person pronouncing the words, the gender of participants, and the valence (positive or negative) of the words in conjunction with their arousing properties. A bisection task was used and the tests, involving four different combinations of valence and arousing conditions (plus a neutral condition), were randomized within trials. The main results revealed that when the valence is negative, participants responded ‘short’ more often when words were pronounced by women rather than by men, and this effect occurred independently of the arousal condition. The results also revealed that overall, males responded ‘longer’ more often than females. Finally, in the negative and low arousal condition, the Weber ratio was higher (lower sensitivity) when a male voice was used than when a female voice was used. This study shows that the gender of the person producing the stimuli whose duration is to be judged should be taken into account when analyzing the effect of emotion on time perception.
... In terms of arousal and valence, the results found here are not consistent with those of previous studies that have shown a direct relationship between duration overestimation and these affective dimensions (Droit-Volet et al., 2004;Droit-Volet & Gil, 2009;Gil & Droit-Volet, 2012;Liu et al., 2015;Van Volkinburg & Balsam, 2014). Our results are also inconsistent with a more recent study suggesting that arousal and valence may lead to temporal underestimation when auditory material is used (Schirmer, Ng, Escoffier, & Penney, 2016). Nevertheless, Halbertsma and Van Rijn (2016) also found a lack of emotional modulation on timing, even though they also employed auditory emotional stimuli. ...
... Nevertheless, Halbertsma and Van Rijn (2016) also found a lack of emotional modulation on timing, even though they also employed auditory emotional stimuli. Interestingly, the present results on retrospective verbal estimation and those reported by Schirmer et al. (2016) and Halbertsma and Van Rijn (2016) appear to contradict the dominant theoretical view that arousal speeds up the internal clock. However, this is not the case for our prospective measure, as will be described further. ...
... However, arousal and valence did not predict the capacity to make quantitative retrospective inferences about the time spent to perform the task, because the average subjective duration judgments did not significantly differ from the actual crossing time. Therefore, no evidence was found that these two affective dimensions directly affected retrospective duration estimates, contrary to previous studies that have found both an overestimation (Droit-Volet et al., 2004;Droit-Volet & Gil, 2009;Gil & Droit-Volet, 2012;Liu et al., 2015;Van Volkinburg & Balsam, 2014) and an underestimation (Schirmer et al., 2016). Thus, the debate on how emotions (in particular arousal and valence) change time is still open, because opposing effects, or no effects, may be found depending on the temporal task and the modality of stimulus presentation. ...
Article
Full-text available
A field study (n = 61) was performed in a Via Ferrata to explore how affective response influences time perception during an arousing activity in a real-life setting (passing through a 69-m-long, 20-m-high, two-rope bridge). Two questionnaires were administered (i) at the end point of the bridge (high-arousing condition) and (ii) close to the end of the Via Ferrata (low-arousing condition). Participants assessed their affect (arousal, valence, and dominance) and provided retrospective (duration estimation and passage of time judgments) and prospective (to produce a subjective minute using a stopwatch) temporal judgments. The results showed that the actual performance mediated the relationship between affect and retrospective time perception measures, with the exception of dominance, which directly predicted passage of time judgments. Regarding prospective measures, an increase in arousal was parallel to shorter temporal productions. The results are discussed in terms of the emotional factors underlying time perception in ecological contexts.Copyright
... For example, in an interactional setting, a nod-a continuous down-up motion of the head-may be short or long, rapid or slow, and may occur sporadically or often, at regular or irregular intervals. Although the different temporal signatures can, in principle, be independent, for natural behaviors they often correlate [5]. For example, short nods are typically also fast, and repeated nods often occur at regular intervals. ...
... Lengthening or shortening a given type of expression by slowing and increasing speed, respectively, produces corresponding changes in emotional meaning. Affective cries of anger and disgust seem more arousing when they are longer and slower as compared to shorter and faster [5]. Longer and slower disgust expressions appear more negative [5]. ...
... Affective cries of anger and disgust seem more arousing when they are longer and slower as compared to shorter and faster [5]. Longer and slower disgust expressions appear more negative [5]. Similarly to voices, the affective ratings of point-light displays of body motion can be described by arousal and valence [8,9]. ...
Article
Temporal and social processing are intricately linked. The temporal extent and organization of interactional behaviors both within and between individuals critically determine interaction success. Conversely, social signals and social context influence time perception by altering subjective duration and making events seem “out of sync”. An "internal clock" involving subcortically orchestrated cortical oscillations that represent temporal information like duration and rhythm as well as insular projections linking temporal information with internal and external experiences is proposed as the core of these reciprocal interactions. The timing of social relative to non-social stimuli augments right insular activity and recruits right superior temporal cortex. Together, these reciprocal neural pathways may enable the exchange and respective modulation of temporal and social computations.
... Although this attentional account fits the present results, it is possible that in other temporal tasks the emotional modulation is driven by changes in arousal. Moreover, as we have not explicitly measured biophysiological markers of arousal, it could be that some of the observed results are driven by an interplay between arousal and attentional processes (see also this issue Droit-Volet et al., 2016;Eberhardt et al., 2016, Schirmer et al., 2016. ...
... At the same time, Experiment 2 is an interesting wake-up call for researchers studying the emotional modulation of interval timing: rerunning a study with participants from a similar participant pool and a highly similar experi- mental setup made some presumably stable effects disappear. In addition, to assess how emotional stimuli influence interval timing, an important line of research should be to establish how robust these findings are by running a num- ber of large-scale, preregistered studies (Open Science Collaboration, 2015), and to address whether there are certain interindividual differences that might explain the susceptibility to emotional influences ( Schirmer et al., 2016). In addition, the differential effects of emotional stimuli suggest that running a series of pre- registered, adversarial collaborations ( Matzke et al., 2015) might be necessary to advance this line of research on interval timing. ...
Article
Emotions modulate cognitive processes, including those involved in the perception of time. A number of studies have demonstrated that the emotional modulation of interval timing can be described in terms of an attentional or an arousal-based mechanism, depending on the exact task setup. In this paper, two temporal generalization experiments with auditory emotional stimuli as distractors are presented. These experiments are modeled after the work by Lui et al. (PLoS One, 2011, 6, e218292011) who, using visual distractors, provided evidence for an attentional account of emotion-regulated modulation of the perception of time. Experiment 1 replicates the findings of Lui et al., and thus generalizes their work to auditory stimuli. However, Experiment 2, in setup highly similar to Experiment 1, failed to find any effects of emotional modulation on interval timing. These results indicate that emotional effects on interval timing, although often reported, might not be as ubiquitous as earlier research has (implicitly) suggested.
... During interpersonal conversations, longer-than-normal gaps in turn-taking signal a semiotic meaning, such as a negative response or trouble in understanding an intended message (Kendrick, 2015;Levinson & Torreira, 2015). Similarly, disgust expressions of longer duration convey a more negative valence (Schirmer, Ng, et al., 2016). You might also think of a situation in which you are in a conversation with two friends, and you want to tell a story (as it matches the current topic of the conversation), but the topic quickly evolves in another direction (as one of those friends tells of something related but with a different twist). ...
Article
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Social neuroscience has often been criticized for approaching the investigation of the neural processes that enable social interaction and cognition from a passive, detached, third-person perspective, without involving any real-time social interaction. With the emergence of second-person neuroscience, investigators have uncovered the unique complexity of neural-activation patterns in actual, real-time interaction. Social cognition that occurs during social interaction is fundamentally different from that unfolding during social observation. However, it remains unclear how the neural correlates of social interaction are to be interpreted. Here, we leverage the active-inference framework to shed light on the mechanisms at play during social interaction in second-person neuroscience studies. Specifically, we show how counterfactually rich mutual predictions, real-time bodily adaptation, and policy selection explain activation in components of the default mode, salience, and frontoparietal networks of the brain, as well as in the basal ganglia. We further argue that these processes constitute the crucial neural processes that underwrite bona fide social interaction. By placing the experimental approach of second-person neuroscience on the theoretical foundation of the active-inference framework, we inform the field of social neuroscience about the mechanisms of real-life interactions. We thereby contribute to the theoretical foundations of empirical second-person neuroscience.
... For each of these regions, data were averaged over electrodes. These regions were selected so they would provide a distributed coverage of the scalp so that topographical effects could be assessed ( Schirmer et al., 2016). ...
Article
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We present the first neurophysiological signatures showing distinctive effects of group social context and emotional arousal on cultural perceptions, such as the efficacy of religious rituals. Using a novel protocol, EEG data were simultaneously recorded from ethnic Chinese religious believers in group and individual settings as they rated the perceived efficacy of low, medium, and high arousal spirit-medium rituals presented as video clips. Neural oscillatory patterns were then analyzed for these perceptual judgements, categorized as low, medium, and high efficacy. The results revealed distinct neural signatures and behavioral patterns between the experimental conditions. Arousal levels predicted ratings of ritual efficacy. Increased efficacy was marked by suppressed alpha and beta power, regardless of group or individual setting. In groups, efficacy ratings converged. Individual setting showed increased within-participant phase synchronization in alpha and beta bands, while group setting enhanced between-participant theta phase synchronization. This reflected group participants' orientation toward a common perspective and social coordination. These findings suggest that co-presence in groups leads to a social-tuning effect supported by between-participant theta phase synchrony. Together these neural synchrony patterns reveal how collective rituals have both individual and communal dimensions. The emotionality of spirit-medium rituals drives individual perceptions of efficacy, while co-presence in groups signals the significance of an event and socially tunes enhanced agreement in perceptual ratings. In other words, mass gatherings may foster social cohesion without necessarily requiring group-size scaling limitations of direct face-to-face interaction. This could have implications for the scaling computability of synchrony in large groups as well as for humanistic studies in areas such as symbolic interactionism.
... Было показано, что длительность стимула с интонацией отвращения воспринимается как более короткая по сравнению с длительностью стимула с удивленной интонацией. Основываясь на полученных данных, А. Schirmer et al. (2016) делают вывод о том, что эмоции препятствуют временной обработке и способствуют влиянию контекста на суждения о времени. При этом суждения о времени больше искажаются у женщин, чем у мужчин [11], а ошибка в оценке длительности больше для правого уха, чем для левого [29]. ...
Article
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Perception of time is one of the most important functions in human life. Coherence of movements and speech, perception properties and relations of objects in sync communication depend on how precisely the differentiation of temporal fractions occurs. That is why this area is of great interest to researchers. For a long period of study, they have accumulated a big store of knowledge; at present, the challenge for researchers is to build up models that can explain the mechanisms underlying these complex mental functions. One of the directions that can provide an explanation for many aspects of time perception is considered to be a transcendental psychology of A.I. Mirakyan
... Affective influences on timing are a major topic in current timing psychology (Halbertsma & Van Rijn, 2016;Langner, Steinborn, Chatterjee, Sturm, & Willmes, 2010;Lui, Penney, & Schirmer, 2011;Matthews et al., 2002;Schirmer, Ng, Escoffier, & Penney, 2016); for reviews see Droit-Volet and Gil (2009);Droit-Volet, Fayolle, Lamotte, and Gil (2013); Lake (2016); Lake, LaBar, and Meck (2016). However, researchers have exclusively focused on time estimation behavior, with no previous studies on the relation between affect and time expectancy or time-based expectancy. ...
Article
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Affective information in our environment is often predictable by time; for example, positive answers are typically given faster than negative ones. Here we demonstrate, for the first time, that humans can implicitly adapt to time-based affect predictability. Participants were asked to categorize words, with the words’ irrelevant valences being predictable by the timing of their occurrence. Adaptation to this pattern became evident by better performance for typical combinations of time and valence, relative to atypical combinations (Experiment 2). A comparable adaptation was observed for predictable activation (another affective dimension, Experiment 4), but not for predictable imageability (a nonaffective dimension, Experiment 3). In none of the experiments did participants become aware of the time-based predictability. These findings have significant implications for our theoretical understanding of human time-based expectancy, as well as important implications for the scheduling of system delays in artificial interaction and communication environments.
... 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). ...
Article
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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.
... With regard to other chapters, the book provides an excellent starting point for appreciating additional current work being done on aging, emotion, and IQ (e.g., Bartholomew et al., 2015;Cheng et al., 2016;Lake et al., 2016a, b;Schirmer et al., 2016b;Turgeon et al., 2016 -inspired, in part, by the pioneering work of Droit-Volet et al., 2004b andWearden et al., 1997) while also allowing for a comparison between prospective timing and retrospective timing, i.e., mentally traveling back in time in order to determine how long something has lasted after the fact (e.g., Addyman et al., 2016;French et al., 2014;MacDonald, 2014;Wearden, 2005). Such estimates have been referred to as "timing without a clock" (Ivry & Hazeltine, 1992) because participants are unaware that time will be a relevant factor when first exposed to the events in question. ...
Article
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Basic mechanisms of interval timing and associative learning are shared by many animal species, and develop quickly in early life, particularly across infancy, and childhood. Indeed, John Wearden in his book “The Psychology of Time Perception”, which is based on decades of his own research with colleagues, and which our commentary serves to primarily review, has been instrumental in implementing animal models and methods in children and adults, and has revealed important similarities (and differences) between human timing (and that of animals) when considered within the context of scalar timing theory. These seminal studies provide a firm foundation upon which the contemporary multifaceted field of timing and time perception has since advanced. The contents of the book are arguably one piece of a larger puzzle, and as Wearden cautions, “The reader is warned that my own contribution to the field has been exaggerated here, but if you are not interested in your own work, why would anyone else be?” Surely there will be many interested readers, however the book is noticeably lacking in it neurobiological perspective. The mind (however it is conceived) needs a brain (even if behaviorists tend to say “the brain behaves”, and most neuroscientists currently have a tenuous grasp on the neural mechanisms of temporal cognition), and to truly understand the psychology of time, brain and behavior must go hand in hand regardless of the twists, turns, and detours along the way.
... A correlation between threat discrimination scores and PSE differences between CS+ and CS− trials was conducted as an a priori planned comparison. Given that anxiety has previously been shown to modulate threat-related temporal distortions and given recent evidence that gender may differentially influence emotion-driven temporal distortions (this issue, Schirmer et al., 2016), we conducted an additional exploratory stepwise regression with PSE differences scores as the dependent variable and threat discrimination scores, trait anxiety, and gender as independent variables to assess whether PSE differences between CS+ and CS− trials could be better explained by including these other independent variables in our model. One potential confound in this design is the amount of SCR recovery after threat trials, which may have indirectly affected SCRs on subsequent neutral trials. ...
Article
Discriminative fear conditioning requires learning to dissociate between safety cues and cues that predict negative outcomes yet little is known about what processes contribute to discriminative fear learning. According to attentional models of time perception, processes that distract from timing result in temporal underestimation. If discriminative fear learning only requires learning what cues predict what outcomes, and threatening stimuli distract attention from timing, then better discriminative fear learning should predict greater temporal distortion on threat trials. Alternatively, if discriminative fear learning also reflects a more accurate perceptual experience of time in threatening contexts, discriminative fear learning scores would predict less temporal distortion on threat trials, as time is perceived more veridically. Healthy young adults completed discriminative fear conditioning in which they learned to associate one stimulus (CS+) with aversive electrical stimulation and another stimulus (CS−) with non-aversive tactile stimulation and then an ordinal-comparison timing task during which CSs were presented as task-irrelevant distractors. Consistent with predictions, we found an overall temporal underestimation bias on CS+ relative to CS− trials. Differential skin conductance responses to the CS+ versus the CS− during conditioning served as a physiological index of discriminative fear conditioning and this measure predicted the magnitude of the underestimation bias, such that individuals exhibiting greater discriminative fear conditioning showed less underestimation on CS+ versus CS− trials. These results are discussed with respect to the nature of discriminative fear learning and the relationship between temporal distortions and maladaptive threat processing in anxiety.
... Hence, we can only speculate whether the present findings and their interpretations generalize to males. However, because emotion effects, if any, could be expected to be greater in female than in male individuals (this issue Schirmer et al., 2016; for a review see Schirmer, 2014), we can nevertheless draw a few conclusions from this study. ...
Article
Previous research showed that fearful faces produce longer temporal estimates than neutral faces. This study probed whether fearful mood enhances this effect. In two experiments, participants viewed neutral and threatening film excerpts and subsequently evaluated the duration of neutral and fearful faces in a bisection task. In Experiment 1, where neutral mood was induced before fearful mood, skin conductance levels (SCLs) and subjective emotion ratings indicated successful mood induction. Compared to neutral mood, fearful mood lengthened subjective duration estimates irrespective of stimulus quality. Additionally, stimuli of fearful faces were temporally overestimated relative to neutral faces; but only in neutral, not in fearful mood. In Experiment 2, where fearful mood was induced before neutral mood, subjective emotion ratings, but not SCLs, indicated successful mood induction. Moreover, neither mood nor facial expressions influenced duration estimation. Taken together, the results show that fearful mood may accelerate an internal pacemaker but does not enhance temporal perception differences between fearful and neutral faces. Additionally, this study highlights the importance of dissociating stimulus, state, and trait emotionality for our understanding of emotional influences on temporal perception.
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Depending on many internal and external factors, the duration of an event may be perceived as longer or shorter than its actual duration. Current research emphasizes the impact of emotion in general, and emotional arousal in particular, on time perception distortion. Many studies have shown that unpleasant and highly aroused emotions (such as fear) cause people to perceive an event to last longer. However, as in many other cognitive processes, it is thought that various dimensions of emotion (motivation, uncertainty, cognitive evaluations, and so on) may play a role in the deterioration of time perception. Nonetheless, there are some theoretical and methodological differences in the time perception studies, such as the definition of arousal, the types of stimuli employed, and experimental controls. The aim of this review is fourfold: (1) introduce the mechanisms underlying the deterioration of time perception, (2) present the current research findings and dimensional approaches on emotion and time perception, (3) reveal the methodological issues and limitations of the studies, and (4) provide alternate interpretations for existing study findings based on appraisal theories that consider several dimensions of emotion. It is commonly agreed that some characteristics, such as the uncertainty of emotional events, the compatibility of the purpose of the perceiver, and the novelty or familiarity of stimulus lead to different cognitive appraisals. However, in the time perception literature, emotion is considered as a two-dimensional structure (valence and arousal), mostly ignoring the effect of cognitive appraisals. This review suggests that internal cognitive evaluations, in addition to the valence and arousal dimensions of emotions, may play a role in time perception and that appraisal theories’ suggested dimensions, such as goal relevance, novelty, uncertainty-certainty, and agency, may provide a comprehensive framework for explaining the current contradictory findings. Future research will focus on explicitly evaluating the aspects indicated by appraisal theories and establishing experimental controls for these dimensions to better understand the function of emotion in time perception.
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Here we asked whether impaired timing in older adults results from an aging clock or a more general brain and cognitive decline. Healthy aging adults (N = 70, aged 62-83 years) tapped to the beat of a periodic and a syncopated rhythm. Analyses focused on performance differences between rhythms (periodic-syncopated), which reduced the impact of timing unrelated processes. Apart from tapping, participants completed a cognitive assessment and neuroimaging of gray matter volume (GMV) and fractional anisotropy (FA) globally as well as regionally (cortical: auditory, premotor, paracentral; subcortical: putamen, caudate, cerebellum). The rhythm difference showed no significant age effects for tapping asynchrony and an age-related decrease for tapping consistency. Additionally, age reduced cognitive functioning, global GMV/FA, and, beyond this, auditory GMV. Irrespective of age, the rhythm difference in tapping asynchrony was linked, not to GMV, but to caudal, premotor, and paracentral FA after controlling for global FA. Tapping consistency was associated with global rather than regional brain integrity. Additionally, age differences in tapping consistency were mediated by a decline in global brain integrity as well as cognitive functioning. Together these results agree with previous proposals differentiating between timing accuracy and reliability and suggest that aging largely preserves the former but not the latter. Whereas timing accuracy may depend on an internal clock supported by robust striatocortical circuitry, timing reliability may depend on global brain and cognitive functioning, which show a pronounced age-related decline. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).
Article
Time sensitivity is affected by emotional stimuli such as fearful faces. The effect of threatening stimuli on time perception depends on numerous factors, including task type and duration range. We applied a two‐interval forced‐choice task using face stimuli to healthy volunteers to evaluate time perception and emotion interaction using functional magnetic resonance imaging. We conducted finite impulse response analysis to examine time series for the significantly activated brain areas and psychophysical interaction to investigate the connectivity between selected regions. Time perception engaged a right lateralised frontoparietal network, while a face discrimination task activated the amygdala and fusiform face area (FFA). No voxels were active with regards to the effect of expression (fearful versus neutral). In parallel with this, our behavioral results showed that attending to the fearful faces did not cause duration overestimation. Finally, connectivity of the amygdala and FFA to the middle frontal gyrus increased during the face processing condition compared to the timing task. Overall, our results suggest that the prefrontal‐amygdala connectivity might be required for the emotional processing of facial stimuli. On the other hand, attentional load, task type, and task difficulty are discussed as possible factors that influence the effects of emotion on time perception. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
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This meta-analysis compares the brain structures and mechanisms involved in facial and vocal emotion recognition. Neuroimaging studies contrasting emotional with neutral (face: N = 76, voice: N = 34) and explicit with implicit emotion processing (face: N = 27, voice: N = 20) were collected to shed light on stimulus and goal driven mechanisms, respectively. Activation likelihood estimations were conducted on the full data sets for the separate modalities and on reduced, modality-matched data sets for modality comparison. Stimulus driven emotion processing engaged large networks with significant modality differences in the superior temporal (voice-specific) and the medial temporal (face-specific) cortex. Goal driven processing was associated with only a small cluster in the left dorsomedial prefrontal cortex for voices but not faces. Neither stimulus nor goal driven processing showed significant modality overlap. Together, these findings suggest that stimulus driven processes shape activity in the social brain more powerfully than goal driven processes in both the visual and the auditory domain. Yet, whereas faces emphasize subcortical emotional and mnemonic mechanisms, voices emphasize cortical mechanisms associated with perception and effortful stimulus evaluation (e.g., via subvocalization). These differences may be due to sensory stimulus properties and highlight the need for a modality-specific perspective when modeling emotion processing in the brain.
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This study explored the temporal course of vocal and emotional sound processing. Participants detected rare repetitions in a stimulus stream comprising neutral and surprised nonverbal exclamations and spectrally rotated control sounds. Spectral rotation preserved some acoustic and emotional properties of the vocal originals. Event-related potentials (ERPs) elicited to unrepeated sounds revealed effects of voiceness and emotion. Relative to nonvocal sounds, vocal sounds elicited a larger centro-parietally distributed N1. This effect was followed by greater positivity to vocal relative to nonvocal sounds beginning with the P2 and extending throughout the recording epoch (N4, late positive potential/LPP) with larger amplitudes in female than in male listeners. Emotion effects overlapped with the voiceness effects but were smaller and differed topographically. Voiceness and emotion interacted only for the LPP, which was greater for vocal-emotional as compared to all other sounds. Taken together, these results point to a multi-stage process in which voiceness and emotionality are represented independently before being integrated in a manner that biases responses to stimuli with socio-emotional relevance.
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In the present study, adults and children aged five and eight years were given a temporal bisection task involving emotional stimuli (angry and neutral faces) and three levels of discrimination difficulty that differed as a function of the ratio used between the short and the long standard duration (very easy, easy, and difficult). In addition, their cognitive capacities in terms of working memory and attention inhibition were assessed by neuropsychological tests. In the very easy temporal task (ratio of 1:4), the results showed that the psychophysical functions were shifted toward the left in all participants for the angry faces compared to the neutral faces, with a significant lowering of the Bisection Point, suggesting that the stimulus duration was judged to last longer for the emotional stimuli. In addition, the results did not show any relationship between the magnitude of this lengthening effect and individual cognitive capacities as assessed by the neuropsychological tests. The individual differences in working memory capacities only explained differences in sensitivity to time. However, when the difficulty of the temporal task increased, the children’s performance decreased and it was no longer possible to test for the emotional effect. Unlike the children, the adults were still able to discriminate time in the emotional task. However, the emotional effect was no longer observed. In conclusion, our study on temporal task difficulty shows the influence of available cognitive resources on the emergence of an emotional effect on time perception.
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The perceived duration of emotional face stimuli strongly depends on the expressed emotion. But, emotional faces also differ regarding a number of other features like gaze, face direction, or sex. Usually, these features have been controlled by only using pictures of female models with straight gaze and face direction. Doi and Shinohara (2009) reported that an overestimation of angry faces could only be found when the model’s gaze was oriented toward the observer. We aimed at replicating this effect for face direction. Moreover, we explored the effect of face direction on the duration perception sad faces. Controlling for the sex of the face model and the participant, female and male participants rated the duration of neutral, angry, and sad face stimuli of both sexes photographed from different perspectives in a bisection task. In line with current findings, we report a significant overestimation of angry compared to neutral face stimuli that was modulated by face direction. Moreover, the perceived duration of sad face stimuli did not differ from that of neutral faces and was not influenced by face direction. Furthermore, we found that faces of the opposite sex appeared to last longer than those of the same sex. This outcome is discussed with regards to stimulus parameters like the induced arousal, social relevance, and an evolutionary context.
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We used human electroencephalogram to study early audiovisual integration of dynamic angry and neutral expressions. An auditory-only condition served as a baseline for the interpretation of integration effects. In the audiovisual conditions, the validity of visual information was manipulated using facial expressions that were either emotionally congruent or incongruent with the vocal expressions. First, we report an N1 suppression effect for angry compared with neutral vocalizations in the auditory-only condition. Second, we confirm early integration of congruent visual and auditory information as indexed by a suppression of the auditory N1 and P2 components in the audiovisual compared with the auditory-only condition. Third, audiovisual N1 suppression was modulated by audiovisual congruency in interaction with emotion: for neutral vocalizations, there was N1 suppression in both the congruent and the incongruent audiovisual conditions. For angry vocalizations, there was N1 suppression only in the congruent but not in the incongruent condition. Extending previous findings of dynamic audiovisual integration, the current results suggest that audiovisual N1 suppression is congruency- and emotion-specific and indicate that dynamic emotional expressions compared with non-emotional expressions are preferentially processed in early audiovisual integration.
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We report results of an acoustic duration reproduction task with stimulus duration of 2, 4, and 6 s, using 45 emotionally negative, positive, and neutral sounds from the International Affective Digitized Sounds System, in a sample of 31 young healthy participants. To investigate the influence of induced emotions on perceived duration, the effects of emotional modulation were quantified in two ways: (1) via model-free indices (aggregated ratios of reproduced times), and (2) via dual klepsydra model (dkm)-based estimates of parameters of internal time representation. Both data-analytic approaches reveal an effect of emotional valence/arousal, namely, a significantly longer reproduction response for emotional stimuli than for the neutral stimuli. The advantage of the dkm-based approach is its ability to disentangle stimulus-related effects, which are represented by "flow intensities," from general effects which are due to the lossy character of temporal integration. We explain the rationale of the dkm-based strategy and interpret the observed effect within the dkm-framework as transient increase of internal "flows." This interpretation is in line with recent conceptualizations of an "embodiment" of time where the model-posited flows correspond to the ongoing stream of interoceptive (bodily) neural signals. Neurophysiological findings on correlations between the processing of body signals and the perception of time provide cumulative evidence for this working hypothesis.
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It is often argued that climbing neural activity, as for example reflected by the contingent negative variation (CNV) in the electroencephalogram, is the signature of the subjective experience of time. According to this view, the resolution of the CNV coincides with termination of subjective timing processes. Paradoxically, behavioral data indicate that participants keep track of timing even after the standard interval (SI) has passed. This study addresses whether timing continues after CNV resolution. In Experiment 1, human participants were asked to discriminate time intervals while evoked potentials (EPs) elicited by the sound terminating a comparison interval (CI) were measured. As the amplitude of N1P2 components increases as a function of the temporal distance from the SI, and the latency of the P2 component followed the hazard rate of the CIs, timing processes continue after CNV resolution. Based on a novel experimental paradigm, statistical model comparisons and trial-by-trial analyses, Experiment 2 supports this finding as subjective time is more accurately indexed by the amplitude of early EPs than by CNV amplitude. These results provide the first direct evidence that subjective timing of multisecond intervals does not depend on climbing neural activity as indexed by the CNV and that the subjective experience of time is better reflected by distinct features of post-CI evoked potentials.
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Emotionally arousing events can distort our sense of time. We used mixed block/event-related fMRI design to establish the neural basis for this effect. Nineteen participants were asked to judge whether angry, happy and neutral facial expressions that varied in duration (from 400 to 1,600 ms) were closer in duration to either a short or long duration they learnt previously. Time was overestimated for both angry and happy expressions compared to neutral expressions. For faces presented for 700 ms, facial emotion modulated activity in regions of the timing network Wiener et al. (NeuroImage 49(2):1728-1740, 2010) namely the right supplementary motor area (SMA) and the junction of the right inferior frontal gyrus and anterior insula (IFG/AI). Reaction times were slowest when faces were displayed for 700 ms indicating increased decision making difficulty. Taken together with existing electrophysiological evidence Ng et al. (Neuroscience, doi: 10.3389/fnint.2011.00077 , 2011), the effects are consistent with the idea that facial emotion moderates temporal decision making and that the right SMA and right IFG/AI are key neural structures responsible for this effect.
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Humans share aspects of their facial affect with other species such as dogs. Here we asked whether untrained human observers with and without dog experience are sensitive to these aspects and recognize dog affect with better-than-chance accuracy. Additionally, we explored similarities in the way observers process dog and human expressions. The stimulus material comprised naturalistic facial expressions of pet dogs and human infants obtained through positive (i.e., play) and negative (i.e., social isolation) provocation. Affect recognition was assessed explicitly in a rating task using full face images and images cropped to reveal the eye region only. Additionally, affect recognition was assessed implicitly in a lexical decision task using full faces as primes and emotional words and pseudowords as targets. We found that untrained human observers rated full face dog expressions from the positive and negative condition more accurately than would be expected by chance. Although dog experience was unnecessary for this effect, it significantly facilitated performance. Additionally, we observed a range of similarities between human and dog face processing. First, the facial expressions of both species facilitated lexical decisions to affectively congruous target words suggesting that their processing was equally automatic. Second, both dog and human negative expressions were recognized from both full and cropped faces. Third, female observers were more sensitive to affective information than were male observers and this difference was comparable for dog and human expressions. Together, these results extend existing work on cross-species similarities in facial emotions and provide evidence that these similarities are naturally exploited when humans interact with dogs.
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Past research has identified an event-related potential (ERP) marker for vocal emotional encoding and has highlighted vocal-processing differences between male and female listeners. We further investigated this ERP vocal-encoding effect in order to determine whether it predicts voice-related changes in listeners' memory for verbal interaction content. Additionally, we explored whether sex differences in vocal processing would affect such changes. To these ends, we presented participants with a series of neutral words spoken with a neutral or a sad voice. The participants subsequently encountered these words, together with new words, in a visual word recognition test. In addition to making old/new decisions, the participants rated the emotional valence of each test word. During the encoding of spoken words, sad voices elicited a greater P200 in the ERP than did neutral voices. While the P200 effect was unrelated to a subsequent recognition advantage for test words previously heard with a neutral as compared to a sad voice, the P200 did significantly predict differences between these words in a concurrent late positive ERP component. Additionally, the P200 effect predicted voice-related changes in word valence. As compared to words studied with a neutral voice, words studied with a sad voice were rated more negatively, and this rating difference was larger, the larger the P200 encoding effect was. While some of these results were comparable in male and female participants, the latter group showed a stronger P200 encoding effect and qualitatively different ERP responses during word retrieval. Estrogen measurements suggested the possibility that these sex differences have a genetic basis.
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In visual images, we perceive both space (as a continuous visual medium) and objects (that inhabit space). Similarly, in dynamic visual experience, we perceive both continuous time and discrete events. What is the relationship between these units of experience? The most intuitive answer may be similar to the spatial case: time is perceived as an underlying medium, which is later segmented into discrete event representations. Here we explore the opposite possibility--that our subjective experience of time itself can be influenced by how durations are temporally segmented, beyond more general effects of change and complexity. We show that the way in which a continuous dynamic display is segmented into discrete units (via a path shuffling manipulation) greatly influences duration judgments, independent of psychophysical factors previously implicated in time perception, such as overall stimulus energy, attention and predictability. It seems that we may use the passage of discrete events--and the boundaries between them--in our subjective experience as part of the raw material for inferring the strength of the underlying "current" of time.
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The relation between the contingent negative variation (CNV) and time estimation is evaluated in terms of temporal accumulation and preparation processes. The conclusion is that the CNV as measured from the electroencephalogram (EEG) recorded at fronto-central and parietal-central areas is not a direct reflection of the underlying interval timing mechanism(s), but more likely represents a time-based response preparation/decision-making process.
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The duration bisection paradigm is a classic task used to examine how humans and other animals perceive time. Typically, participants first learn short and long anchor durations and are subsequently asked to classify probe durations as closer to the short or long anchor duration. However, the specific representations of time and the decision rules applied in this task remain the subject of debate. For example, researchers have questioned whether participants actually use representations of the short and long anchor durations in the decision process rather than merely a response threshold that is derived from those anchor durations. Electroencephalographic (EEG) measures, like the contingent negative variation (CNV), can provide information about the perceptual and cognitive processes that occur between the onset of the timing stimulus and the motor response. The CNV has been implicated as an electrophysiological marker of interval timing processes such as temporal accumulation, representation of the target duration, and the decision that the target duration has been attained. We used the CNV to investigate which durations are involved in the bisection categorization decision. The CNV increased in amplitude up to the value of the short anchor, remained at a constant level until about the geometric mean (GM) of the short and long anchors, and then began to resolve. These results suggest that the short anchor and the GM of the short and long anchors are critical target durations used in the bisection categorization decision process. In addition, larger mean N1P2 amplitude differences were associated with larger amplitude CNVs, which may reflect the participant's precision in initiating timing on each trial across a test session. Overall, the results demonstrate the value of using scalp-recorded EEG to address basic questions about interval timing.
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Previous research has demonstrated that both emotional valence and arousal can influence the subjective experience of time. The current research extends this work by (1) identifying how quickly this emotional modulation of time perception can occur and (2) examining whether valence and arousal have different effects at different stages of perception. These questions were addressed using a temporal bisection task. In each block of this task, participants are trained to distinguish between two different exposure durations. Participants are then shown stimuli presented at a number of durations that fall between the two learned times, and are asked to indicate whether the test stimulus was closer in duration to the shorter or longer learned item. In the current study, participants completed blocks of trials in which the durations were "Short" (100-300 ms) or "Long" (400-1600 ms). Stimuli consisted of neutral photographs as well as four categories of emotional images: high-arousal negative, high-arousal positive, low-arousal negative, and low-arousal positive. In Short blocks, arousing and nonarousing negative images were judged to have been shown for shorter durations than they actually were (i.e., the duration was underestimated); this effect occurred at durations as brief as 133 ms. In Long blocks, the display time for highly arousing negative items was overestimated, whereas durations were underestimated for highly arousing positive items and less arousing negative items. These data suggest that arousal and valence have different effects at different stages of perception, possibly due to the different neural structures involved at each stage of the emotional modulation of time perception.
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Experimental evidence suggests that emotions can both speed-up and slow-down the internal clock. Speeding up has been observed for to-be-timed emotional stimuli that have the capacity to sustain attention, whereas slowing down has been observed for to-be-timed neutral stimuli that are presented in the context of emotional distractors. These effects have been explained by mechanisms that involve changes in bodily arousal, attention, or sentience. A review of these mechanisms suggests both merits and difficulties in the explanation of the emotion-timing link. Therefore, a hybrid mechanism involving stimulus-specific sentient representations is proposed as a candidate for mediating emotional influences on time. According to this proposal, emotional events enhance sentient representations, which in turn support temporal estimates. Emotional stimuli with a larger share in ones sentience are then perceived as longer than neutral stimuli with a smaller share.
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Sex differences in the rapid and acute effects of estradiol on time perception were investigated in adult male and female Sprague-Dawley rats. Because estradiol has been shown to increase striatal dopamine release, it may be able to modify time perception and timed performance by increasing the speed of an internal clock in a manner similar to indirect dopamine agonists such as amphetamine and cocaine. Two groups of females (neonatally estradiol-treated/adult ovariectomized and neonatally oil-treated/adult ovariectomized) and two groups of males (neonatally castrated and adult castrated) were trained in a 2 vs. 8-s duration bisection procedure and tested using intermediate signal durations. After obtaining oil-injected baseline psychometric functions over several days, rats were administered 5 μg of estradiol for 4 days and behaviorally evaluated 30 min following each injection. This oil-estradiol administration cycle was subsequently repeated three times following the re-establishment of baseline training. Results revealed significant sex differences in the initial baseline functions that were not modifiable by organizational hormones, with males' duration bisection functions shifted horizontally to the left of females'. Upon the first administration of estradiol, females, but not males, showed a significant, transient leftward shift in their bisection functions, indicative of an increase in clock speed. After extensive retraining in the duration bisection procedure, rats that were exposed to gonadal hormones during the first week of life showed a significant rightward shift in their bisection functions on the fourth day of estradiol administration during each cycle, suggesting a decrease in clock speed. Taken together, our results support the view that there are multiple mechanisms of estrogens' action in the striatum that modulate dopaminergic activity and are differentially organized by gonadal steroids during early brain development.
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Numerous studies have shown that contingent negative variation (CNV) measured at fronto-central and parietal-central areas is closely related to interval timing. However, the exact nature of the relation between CNV and the underlying timing mechanisms is still a topic of discussion. On the one hand, it has been proposed that the CNV measured at supplementary motor area (SMA) is a direct reflection of the unfolding of time since a perceived onset, whereas other work has suggested that the increased amplitude reflects decision processes involved in interval timing. Strong evidence for the first view has been reported by Macar et al. (1999), who showed that variations in temporal performance were reflected in the measured CNV amplitude. If the CNV measured at SMA is a direct function of the passing of time, habituation effects are not expected. Here we report two replication studies, which both failed to replicate the expected performance-dependent variations. Even more powerful linear-mixed effect analyses failed to find any performance related effects on the CNV amplitude, whereas habituation effects were found. These studies therefore suggest that the CNV amplitude does not directly reflect the unfolding of time.
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Emotional inferences from speech require the integration of verbal and vocal emotional expressions. We asked whether this integration is comparable when listeners are exposed to their native language and when they listen to a language learned later in life. To this end, we presented native and non-native listeners with positive, neutral and negative words that were spoken with a happy, neutral or sad tone of voice. In two separate tasks, participants judged word valence and ignored tone of voice or judged emotional tone of voice and ignored word valence. While native listeners outperformed non-native listeners in the word valence task, performance was comparable in the voice task. More importantly, both native and non-native listeners responded faster and more accurately when verbal and vocal emotional expressions were congruent as compared to when they were incongruent. Given that the size of the latter effect did not differ as a function of language proficiency, one can conclude that the integration of verbal and vocal emotional expressions occurs as readily in one's second language as it does in one's native language.
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Disgust is an evolved psychological system for protecting organisms from infection through disease avoidant behaviour. This 'behavioural immune system', present in a diverse array of species, exhibits universal features that orchestrate hygienic behaviour in response to cues of risk of contact with pathogens. However, disgust is also a dynamic adaptive system. Individuals show variation in pathogen avoidance associated with psychological traits like having a neurotic personality, as well as a consequence of being in certain physiological states such as pregnancy or infancy. Three specialized learning mechanisms modify the disgust response: the Garcia effect, evaluative conditioning and the law of contagion. Hygiene behaviour is influenced at the group level through social learning heuristics such as 'copy the frequent'. Finally, group hygiene is extended symbolically to cultural rules about purity and pollution, which create social separations and are enforced as manners. Cooperative hygiene endeavours such as sanitation also reduce pathogen prevalence. Our model allows us to integrate perspectives from psychology, ecology and cultural evolution with those of epidemiology and anthropology. Understanding the nature of disease avoidance psychology at all levels of human organization can inform the design of programmes to improve public health.
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Two experiments were conducted to investigate the effect of a threatening stimulus in human adults in a temporal bisection task. In Experiment 1, for two anchor duration conditions (400/800 vs. 800/1600 ms), the participants completed trials in which the probe duration was followed by an aversive stimulus or a nonaversive stimulus. The results showed that the duration was judged longer when the participants expected an aversive rather than a nonaversive stimulus. In Experiment 2, the effect of the temporal localization of the aversive stimulus was also tested, with the aversive stimulus being presented at the beginning or at the end of the probe duration. The results revealed a temporal overestimation in each condition compared to the trials in which no aversive stimulus was presented. Furthermore, the temporal overestimation was greater when the expectation for the forthcoming threatening stimulus was longer. This temporal overestimation is explained in terms of a speeding-up of the neural timing system in response to the increase in the arousal level produced by the expectation of a threatening stimulus.
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When an adult claims he cannot sleep without his teddy bear, people tend to react surprised. Language interpretation is, thus, influenced by social context, such as who the speaker is. The present study reveals inter-individual differences in brain reactivity to social aspects of language. Whereas women showed brain reactivity when stereotype-based inferences about a speaker conflicted with the content of the message, men did not. This sex difference in social information processing can be explained by a specific cognitive trait, one’s ability to empathize. Individuals who empathize to a greater degree revealed larger N400 effects (as well as a larger increase in γ-band power) to socially relevant information. These results indicate that individuals with high-empathizing skills are able to rapidly integrate information about the speaker with the content of the message, as they make use of voice-based inferences about the speaker to process language in a top-down manner. Alternatively, individuals with lower empathizing skills did not use information about social stereotypes in implicit sentence comprehension, but rather took a more bottom-up approach to the processing of these social pragmatic sentences.
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Time perception, crucial for adaptive behavior, has been shown to be altered by emotion. An arousal-dependent mechanism is proposed to account for such an effect. Yet, physiological measure of arousal related with emotional timing is still lacking. We addressed this question using skin conductance response (SCR) in an emotion regulation paradigm. Nineteen participants estimated durations of neutral and negative sounds by comparing them to a previously memorized duration. Instructions were given to attend either to temporal or to emotional stimulus features. Attending to emotion with negative sounds generated longer subjective duration and greater physiological arousal than attending to time. However, a shared-attention condition showed discrepancy between behavioral and physiological results. Supporting the idea of a link between autonomic arousal and subjective duration, our results however suggest that this relation is not as direct as was expected. Results are discussed within recent model linking time perception, emotion and awareness.
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The present study explored the effect of speaker prosody on the representation of words in memory. To this end, participants were presented with a series of words and asked to remember the words for a subsequent recognition test. During study, words were presented auditorily with an emotional or neutral prosody, whereas during test, words were presented visually. Recognition performance was comparable for words studied with emotional and neutral prosody. However, subsequent valence ratings indicated that study prosody changed the affective representation of words in memory. Compared to words with neutral prosody, words with sad prosody were later rated as more negative and words with happy prosody were later rated as more positive. Interestingly, the participants' ability to remember study prosody failed to predict this effect, suggesting that changes in word valence were implicit and associated with initial word processing rather than word retrieval. Taken together these results identify a mechanism by which speakers can have sustained effects on listener attitudes towards word referents.
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The mismatch negativity (MMN) is a brain response to violations of a rule, established by a sequence of sensory stimuli (typically in the auditory domain) [Näätänen R. Attention and brain function. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum; 1992]. The MMN reflects the brain's ability to perform automatic comparisons between consecutive stimuli and provides an electrophysiological index of sensory learning and perceptual accuracy. Although the MMN has been studied extensively, the neurophysiological mechanisms underlying the MMN are not well understood. Several hypotheses have been put forward to explain the generation of the MMN; amongst these accounts, the "adaptation hypothesis" and the "model adjustment hypothesis" have received the most attention. This paper presents a review of studies that focus on neuronal mechanisms underlying the MMN generation, discusses the two major explanatory hypotheses, and proposes predictive coding as a general framework that attempts to unify both.
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Motivation for goal-directed behaviour largely depends on the expected value of the anticipated reward. The aim of the present study was to examine how different levels of reward value are coded in the brain for two common forms of human reward: money and social approval. To account for gender differences 16 male and 16 female participants performed an incentive delay task expecting to win either money or positive social feedback. fMRI recording during the anticipation phase revealed proportional activation of neural structures constituting the human reward system for increasing levels of reward, independent of incentive type. However, in men activation in the prospect of monetary rewards encompassed a wide network of mesolimbic brain regions compared to only limited activation for social rewards. In contrast, in women, anticipation of either incentive type activated identical brain regions. Our findings represent an important step towards a better understanding of motivated behaviour by taking into account individual differences in reward valuation.
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Emotions modulate cognitive processes, including those involved in the perception of time. A number of studies have demonstrated that the emotional modulation of interval timing can be described in terms of an attentional or an arousal-based mechanism, depending on the exact task setup. In this paper, two temporal generalization experiments with auditory emotional stimuli as distractors are presented. These experiments are modeled after the work by Lui et al. (PLoS One, 2011, 6, e218292011) who, using visual distractors, provided evidence for an attentional account of emotion-regulated modulation of the perception of time. Experiment 1 replicates the findings of Lui et al., and thus generalizes their work to auditory stimuli. However, Experiment 2, in setup highly similar to Experiment 1, failed to find any effects of emotional modulation on interval timing. These results indicate that emotional effects on interval timing, although often reported, might not be as ubiquitous as earlier research has (implicitly) suggested.
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Discriminative fear conditioning requires learning to dissociate between safety cues and cues that predict negative outcomes yet little is known about what processes contribute to discriminative fear learning. According to attentional models of time perception, processes that distract from timing result in temporal underestimation. If discriminative fear learning only requires learning what cues predict what outcomes, and threatening stimuli distract attention from timing, then better discriminative fear learning should predict greater temporal distortion on threat trials. Alternatively, if discriminative fear learning also reflects a more accurate perceptual experience of time in threatening contexts, discriminative fear learning scores would predict less temporal distortion on threat trials, as time is perceived more veridically. Healthy young adults completed discriminative fear conditioning in which they learned to associate one stimulus (CS+) with aversive electrical stimulation and another stimulus (CS−) with non-aversive tactile stimulation and then an ordinal-comparison timing task during which CSs were presented as task-irrelevant distractors. Consistent with predictions, we found an overall temporal underestimation bias on CS+ relative to CS− trials. Differential skin conductance responses to the CS+ versus the CS− during conditioning served as a physiological index of discriminative fear conditioning and this measure predicted the magnitude of the underestimation bias, such that individuals exhibiting greater discriminative fear conditioning showed less underestimation on CS+ versus CS− trials. These results are discussed with respect to the nature of discriminative fear learning and the relationship between temporal distortions and maladaptive threat processing in anxiety.
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Previous research showed that fearful faces produce longer temporal estimates than neutral faces. This study probed whether fearful mood enhances this effect. In two experiments, participants viewed neutral and threatening film excerpts and subsequently evaluated the duration of neutral and fearful faces in a bisection task. In Experiment 1, where neutral mood was induced before fearful mood, skin conductance levels (SCLs) and subjective emotion ratings indicated successful mood induction. Compared to neutral mood, fearful mood lengthened subjective duration estimates irrespective of stimulus quality. Additionally, stimuli of fearful faces were temporally overestimated relative to neutral faces; but only in neutral, not in fearful mood. In Experiment 2, where fearful mood was induced before neutral mood, subjective emotion ratings, but not SCLs, indicated successful mood induction. Moreover, neither mood nor facial expressions influenced duration estimation. Taken together, the results show that fearful mood may accelerate an internal pacemaker but does not enhance temporal perception differences between fearful and neutral faces. Additionally, this study highlights the importance of dissociating stimulus, state, and trait emotionality for our understanding of emotional influences on temporal perception.
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In the present study, adults and children aged five and eight years were given a temporal bisection task involving emotional stimuli (angry and neutral faces) and three levels of discrimination difficulty that differed as a function of the ratio used between the short and the long standard duration (very easy, easy, and difficult). In addition, their cognitive capacities in terms of working memory and attention inhibition were assessed by neuropsychological tests. In the very easy temporal task (ratio of 1:4), the results showed that the psychophysical functions were shifted toward the left in all participants for the angry faces compared to the neutral faces, with a significant lowering of the Bisection Point, suggesting that the stimulus duration was judged to last longer for the emotional stimuli. In addition, the results did not show any relationship between the magnitude of this lengthening effect and individual cognitive capacities as assessed by the neuropsychological tests. The individual differences in working memory capacities only explained differences in sensitivity to time. However, when the difficulty of the temporal task increased, the children’s performance decreased and it was no longer possible to test for the emotional effect. Unlike the children, the adults were still able to discriminate time in the emotional task. However, the emotional effect was no longer observed. In conclusion, our study on temporal task difficulty shows the influence of available cognitive resources on the emergence of an emotional effect on time perception.
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The relation between the contingent negative variation (CNV) and time estimation is evaluated in terms of temporal accumulation and preparation processes. The conclusion is that the CNV as measured from the electroencephalogram (EEG) recorded at fronto-central and parietal-central areas is not a direct reflection of the underlying interval timing mechanism(s), but more likely represents a time-based response preparation/ decision-making process.
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Objective: Verify and explore unexpected results suggesting an effect of deviance direction (shorter or longer deviants) on the amplitude of MMNs evoked by sound duration contrasts. Methods: MMNs were recorded using the oddball paradigm on ten adults. Four standard stimulus durations (100, 150, 200 and 250 ms) were used and deviants were 50% shorter or longer. Behavioral data (hit rates, d 0 , and reaction times) were collected after the electrophysiological sessions. Results: MMNs were larger for short than for long deviants. There was no effect on MMN latencies. Hit rates and d 0 data were almost at ceiling level for all conditions even for the longest standard – long deviant combination in which the MMN was abolished. Conclusions: We argue that the deviance direction effect on MMN amplitudes can be explained by the delay between the moment of deviance detection and the end of the deviance quantification process. Significance: A major effect of deviance direction on amplitudes was confirmed. This effect, which was confined to electrophysiological data, is to be taken into account when using duration contrasts to probe the processing of temporal information.
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Four experiments investigated potential interactions between emotional content and perceptual asymmetries in the estimation of short time intervals. In all experiments, the word "bower" was presented monaurally to the left or right ear in an emotional tone and participants performed a temporal bisection task. In Experiment 1, angry and neutral stimuli ranged in duration from 260 to 440 ms (in steps of 20 ms) whereas in Experiments 2-4, durations ranged from 260 to 480 ms (in steps of 20 ms). In Experiment 3, the emotional tone of happiness replaced anger. In Experiment 4, anger and happiness were used as stimuli. In all experiments, results showed a larger bisection point for the right compared to the left ear. In addition, in all experiments, the constant error was farther away from zero for the right than for the left ear. The bisection point was also longer for the angry (Experiments 1 and 2) or happy (Experiment 3) than for the neutral emotional tone. Finally, happiness produced a shorter bisection point than anger in Experiment 4. Results are discussed in terms of their implications for time perception mechanisms and their potential cerebral representation.
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Variations in both pitch and time are important in conveying meaning through speech and music, however, re- search is scant on perceptual interactions between these two domains. Using an ordinal comparison procedure, we explored how different pitch levels of ␣anker tones in␣uenced the perceived duration of empty interstimulus intervals (ISIs). Participants heard monotonic, isochronous tone sequences (ISIs of 300, 600, or 1200 ms) com- posed of either one or ␣ve standard ISIs ␣anked by 500 Hz tones, followed by a ␣nal interval (FI) ␣anked by tones of either the same (500 Hz), higher (625 Hz), or lower (400 Hz) pitch. The FI varied in duration around the standard ISI duration. Participants were asked to determine if the FI was longer or shorter in duration than the preceding intervals. We found that an increase in FI ␣anker tone pitch level led to the underestimation of FI durations while a decrease in FI ␣anker tone pitch led to the overestimation of FI durations. The magnitude of these pitch-level effects decreased as the duration of the standard interval was increased, suggesting that the effect was driven by differences in mode-switch latencies to start/stop timing. Temporal context (One vs. Five Standard ISIs) did not have a consistent effect on performance. We propose that the interaction between pitch and time may have important consequences in understanding the ways in which meaning and emotion are communicated.
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Sex stereotypes consider women to be superior in terms of voice sensitivity. However, whether such sex differences are driven by voice perception per se or by low-level acoustic attributes remains unclear. Using a passive auditory oddball paradigm, we studied the emotionally spoken meaningless syllables 'dada' (neutral, happy, fearful) along with corresponding nonvocal sounds in female and male adults. Mismatch negativity (MMN) and P3a were identified in the waveforms obtained by subtraction of the responses to standard stimuli from the deviant stimuli. Results showed that MMN in response to fearful syllables was stronger in women, whereas MMN elicited by nonvocal sounds was comparable between sexes. This sex effect was specifically found in MMN, but not in P3a. These findings suggest that sex differences in voice sensitivity are selectively driven by voice perception. The sex effect in preattentive processing of emotional voices may further implicate possible etiological pathways for mental disorders characterized by disturbance in emotional processes as well as disparities in the prevalence between sexes.
Article
The impact of emotions on gaze-oriented attention was investigated in non-anxious participants. A neutral face cue with straight gaze was presented, which then averted its gaze to the side while remaining neutral or expressing an emotion (fear/surprise in Exp.1 and anger/happiness in Exp.2). Localization of a subsequent target was faster at the gazed-at location (congruent condition) than at the non-gazed-at location (incongruent condition). This Gaze-Orienting Effect (GOE) was enhanced for fear, surprise, and anger, compared to neutral expressions which did not differ from happy expressions. In addition, Event Related Potentials (ERPs) to the target showed a congruency effect on P1 for fear and surprise and a left lateralized congruency effect on P1 for happy faces, suggesting that target visual processing was also influenced by attention to gaze and emotions. Finally, at cue presentation, early postero-lateral (Early Directing Attention Negativity (EDAN)) and later antero-lateral (Anterior Directing Attention Negativity (ADAN)) attention-related ERP components were observed, reflecting, respectively, the shift of attention and its holding at gazed-at locations. These two components were not modulated by emotions. Together, these findings show that the processing of social signals such as gaze and facial expression interact rather late and in a complex manner to modulate spatial attention.
Article
The ability to perceive emotions is imperative for successful interpersonal functioning. The present study examined the neural characteristics of emotional prosody perception with an exploratory event-related potential analysis. Participants were 59 healthy individuals who completed a discrimination task presenting 120 semantically neutral word pairs from five prosody conditions (happy/happy, angry/angry, neutral/neutral, angry/happy, happy/angry). The task required participants to determine whether words in the pair were spoken in same or different emotional prosody. Reflective of an initial processing stage, word 1 N1component was found to have greatest amplitude in parietal regions of the hemispheres, and was largest for emotional compared to neutral stimuli, indicating detection of emotion features. A second processing stage, represented by word 1 P2, showed similar topographic effects, however, amplitude was largest for happy in the left hemisphere while angry was largest in the right, illustrating differentiation of emotions. At the third processing stage, word 1 N3 amplitude was largest in frontal regions, indicating later cognitive processing occurs in the frontal cortex. N3 was largest for happy, which had lowest accuracy compared to angry and neutral. The present results support Schirmer and Kotz's (2006) model of vocal emotion perception because they elucidated the function and ERP components by reflecting three primary stages of emotional prosody perception, controlling for semantic influence.
Article
Humans exhibit a remarkable ability to accurately judge time intervals, but this ability varies among individuals and across situations. Research suggests that arousal and attentional factors are consistently associated with subjective time distortions, and emotions such as anger, which can elicit arousal and attract attention, have frequently been studied in this context. Typically, viewing angry faces seems to consistently produce time overestimation relative to neutral faces, and the present study investigates the possibility that this effect extends to angry voices by means of a temporal bisection task. Additionally, this paper furthers previous findings that interhemispheric interaction as quantified by handedness strength (i.e., the degree to which one favours one hand over the other) is related to how individuals perceive future time points on an imagined time task, and explores the possibility that handedness strength differences may also manifest as differences in bisection task performance. Results showed that handedness strength was associated with differences in time perception in both objective (bisection) and subjective (imagined) contexts. Bisection task data further revealed that the angry stimulus was associated with decreased temporal sensitivity and a greater propensity to categorise stimuli as "short" as compared to the same stimulus spoken in a neutral voice, which contrasts with studies conducted using angry faces. Possible attentional explanations for these findings and suggestions for future research directions are discussed.
Article
Two experiments used click-trains to manipulate the subjective duration of stimuli they preceded, in attempts to demonstrate relative slowing down of the pacemaker of a hypothesized internal clock. Experiment 1 used a pair comparison procedure, where two tones presented on each trial in fact had the same duration. In the conditions of particular interest, the first tone was preceded by clicks (thus putatively timed with a faster clock), the other presented without (thus timed normally). The reverse condition (no-clicks/clicks) was also used. Judgements of the relative duration of the stimuli were shifted in both directions (i.e. first tone longer than second and vice versa) by the manipulation, consistent with relative speeding up and slowing down of the pacemaker. Experiment 2 used the popular bisection method, with 200- and 800-ms tones used as the Short and Long standards for the task. After standard presentations, subjects were required to classify a range of comparison stimuli (from 200 to 800 ms in 100-ms steps) in terms of their similarity to one or the other of the standards. In one condition the comparison stimuli were preceded by clicks (thus timed ‘fast’) and the standards were presented without clicks (thus timed ‘normally’); in another condition the clicks preceded the standards but not the comparisons. The psychophysical function obtained from the bisection procedure shifted in opposite directions with the different manipulations, consistent with both relative ‘speeding up’ and ‘slowing down’ of the pacemaker of the internal clock.
Article
The present study investigated the perception of stimulus durations represented by elderly faces or by young faces. In a temporal bisection task, participants classified intermediate durations as more similar to a short or a long reference duration. The results showed that the durations represented by elderly faces were less often classified as “long” than the durations represented by young faces. According to internal clock models of time perception, this shortening effect is due to a slowing down of the speed of the internal clock during the perception of elderly faces. Analyses also revealed an interaction between sex of face and sex of participant such that this shortening effect occurred only when the participants share the same sex than the stimulus faces. As discussed, this finding is quite consistent with embodied cognition approaches to information processing, but alternatives accounts are also considered.
Article
Why does a clock sometimes appear stopped? Is it possible to perceive the world in slow motion during a car accident? Can action and effect be reversed? Time perception is surprisingly prone to measurable distortions and illusions. The past few years have introduced remarkable progress in identifying and quantifying temporal illusions of duration, temporal order, and simultaneity. For example, perceived durations can be distorted by saccades, by an oddball in a sequence, or by stimulus complexity or magnitude. Temporal order judgments of actions and sensations can be reversed by the exposure to delayed motor consequences, and simultaneity judgments can be manipulated by repeated exposure to nonsimultaneous stimuli. The confederacy of recently discovered illusions points to the underlying neural mechanisms of time perception.
Article
The current study investigated how the development of cognitive abilities explains the age-related changes in temporal judgment over short and long duration ranges from 0.5 to 30s. Children (5- and 9-year-olds) as well as adults were given a temporal bisection task with four different duration ranges: a duration range shorter than 1s, two duration ranges longer than 3s (4-8s and >15s), and an intermediate duration range (1.25-2.5s). Their cognitive abilities were also assessed using a series of neuropsychological tests. The results showed that temporal sensitivity improved with age for each duration range but that this improvement occurred earlier for the short durations than for the long durations. Furthermore, the results revealed that the age-related improvement in time sensitivity for the durations shorter than 1s was explained by the development of short-term memory span, whereas that for long durations was explained by the development of attention/executive functions. To summarize, the development of the abilities required to process long durations seems to be explained mainly by the development of attentional resources.
Article
Event related potentials (ERPs) recorded from the scalp of man were studied during a time estimation task. The principal ERP correlate of mental activity associated with time estimation appeared to be a CNV wave followed by a late positive shift. Latency of CNV termination was correlated with temporal judgments. There was some evidence that the onset of CNV termination occurred prior to the estimated time of occurrence of cortical motor command signals associated with production of the temporal judgments.
Article
Two dichotic listening experiments were performed in which stimulus and task conditions were optimized for the early selection of inputs. Subjects listened selectively to sequences of rapidly presented tone pips in one ear while ignoring tone pips of a different pitch in the opposite ear. In both experiments, an enhanced positivity between 20 and 50 msec (the 'P20-50') was observed over central and frontal sites in the ERPs to the attended-channel tone pips. At longer latencies, the effects of attention appeared to include an amplitude modulation of several exogenous ERPs, including subcomponents of the central N1 (60-150 msec) and P2 (170-230 msec) waves and the temporal T complex (80-150 msec). In contrast, the attention effect prefrontally consisted of a broad negativity that appeared to be largely endogenous. A signal processing technique (Adjar) was employed to correct for distortion of mutually overlapping ERPs elicited by successive stimuli presented at short interstimulus intervals (ISIs). It was confirmed that the P20-50 attention effect was not the result of differential overlap from previous ERPs. In addition, this technique allowed an analysis to be made of the effects of the preceding stimulus type and ISI on the attention-sensitive ERPs, which provided further support for the view that highly focused selective attention can directly modulate exogenous components of the auditory ERP. Moreover, these sequence-dependent ERP modulations were paralleled by variations in target discrimination performance. Taken together, these results provide strong support for the early selection hypothesis that attention can serve to selectively bias or gate stimulus processing before full perceptual analysis has occurred.