Effect of Basic Emotional Facial Expressions on Time Perception

The main aim of this study was to investigate the influence of stimulus duration manipulations of pictures expressing universal six basic emotions by using a prospective paradigm including verbal estimation and reproduction tasks. The study was conducted with 75 participants (47 female and 28 male) who verbally estimated and reproduced the duration of emotional facial expressions (anger, fear, sadness, disgust, surprise, happiness and neutral) presented for different durations (500, 1000, 1500, and 2000 ms). In each presentation duration, durations of all emotional facial expressions were perceived to be shorter than target durations and temporal distortions increase with duration of intervals. On the other hand, durations of all emotional facial expressions except the sadness facial expression were perceived longer than the duration of neutral facial expression. According to internal clock model and in the context of arousal and attention, tendency to underestimate the duration of emotional stimuli compared to target duration was consistent with an attentional model while tendency to overestimate duration of the emotional stimuli compared to duration of neutral stimulus was consistent with the arousal based model. The findings of this study suggested that in regard to the effects of emotional facial expressions on time perception, not only the involvement of effects emanating from arousal and attention but also memory and decision making processes could have an effect due to the type of temporal task difference.