Awe and time perception

Acta Psychol (Amst). 2024 Mar 23;245:104232. doi: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2024.104232. Online ahead of print.ABSTRACTThe aim of this study was to systematically examine the effect of awe-inducing stimuli on the judgment of time. Three experiments were conducted using temporal bisection tasks in which participants viewed awe-inducing and no awe-inducing images presented for different durations and were asked to judge whether their duration was similar to a short or long anchor duration. Images of panoramic landscapes and images of the faces of well-known and admired people were used in experiments 1 and 2, respectively. In experiment 3, they did not judge the duration of the images, but that of a neutral stimulus occurring during the presentation of images. In each experiment, participants rated the awe-inducing and no-awe-inducing images according to their components: admiration, beauty, awe, emotional valence, arousal, symbolic self-size, and full-body self-size. Results consistently showed significant time distortions when participants viewed the different awe-inducing images compared to the no-awe images, although the effect was weaker for the images of faces than for those of landscapes. Time distortion took the form of temporal lengthening in Experiments 1 and 2 and shortening in Experiment 3. These different temporal distortions are consistent with attention effects due to awe-inducing stimuli which capture attention to the detriment of time processing.PMID:38522351 | DOI:10.1...

Source: Acta Psychologica - March 24, 2024 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Sylvie Droit-Volet Micha ël Dambrun Florie Monier Source Type: research