Time perception of emotional events

This study investigates whether the accuracy of time perception is influenced by the nature of emotional events and whether time perception has gender differences. Subjects were asked to control the presenting time of pictures of affective facial expressions and to match it with a pre-specified time range. Results showed that ( 1) compared with the neutral condition, subjects tended to underestimate the time for angry expressions and to overestimate the time for happy expressions; (2) women overestimated the time range much more than men for all the three types of expressions; (3) the size of overestimation steadily decreased over time ranges (0.5-6 sec), and the influence by the affective expressions was observed only at the short time ranges (0.5-2 sec.). These results suggest that time perception of emotional events is varied with emotional valence, and women tend to overestimate all the emotional events.