The Effect Of Emotion On Temporal Duration Perception And Its Gender Differences

Time is an important dimension of the world.In the field of psychology,undoubtedly,time is also the basis of all mental activities and the cornerstone of all kinds of cognitive processing.Temporal duration perception refers to the perceptual experience of timing interval.Based on some theoretical models about the time perception,such as an internal clock,numerous studies have proven the effect of emotion on temporal perception.They used various emotional stimuli,including facial expressions and emotional pictures,movies or audios.However,research investigating this issue from the lexico-semantic perspective and gender difference remains scarce.During reviewing the literature,we found that emotional words can be processed cognitively like other kinds of emotional stimuli,and share a common affective evaluation space(i.e.,valence-arousal).Thus,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.