AUTHOR=Schirmer Annett TITLE=How Emotions Change Time JOURNAL=Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience VOLUME=5 YEAR=2011 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/integrative-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnint.2011.00058 DOI=10.3389/fnint.2011.00058 ISSN=1662-5145 ABSTRACT=

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.