How Individuals Perceive Time in an Anxious State: The Mediating Effect of Attentional Bias

Three experiments were conducted to investigate the mediating effect of attentional bias on the relationship between state anxiety and time perception. In Experiment 1, state anxiety (high and low) was manipulated by a standardized induction procedure, attentional bias was tested by a dot-probe task, and time perception of words (negative and neutral) was tested by a time reproduction task in which a standard duration of 2 s was used. In Experiment 2, multiple durations (2, 4, and 8 s) were tested within subjects, and negative and neutral low-arousal pictures were selected for the dot-probe task and the time reproduction task. In Experiment 3, attentional bias was manipulated by an attentional bias modification training to test the causal relationship between attentional bias and time perception. The results suggested that (a) participants in an anxious state showed an attentional bias toward negative stimuli and perceived a 2-s duration as longer when stimuli were negative as opposed to when they were neutral, (b) attentional bias toward negative stimuli mediated the influence of state anxiety on time perception, and (c) attentional bias had a direct impact on time perception. Our findings contribute to the understanding of the role that attention plays in how individuals perceive time in an anxious state and provide novel evidence supporting the attentional gate model.