Time flies when we read taboo words

JASON TIPPLES 0 0 University of Hull , Hull, England Does time fly or stand still when one is reading highly arousing words? A temporal bisection task was used to test the effects of sexual taboo words on time perception. Forty participants judged the duration of sexual taboo, high-arousal negative, high-arousal positive, low-arousal negative, low-arousal positive, and category-related neutral words. The results support the hypothesis that sexual taboo stimuli receive more attention and reduce the perceived time that has passed (time flies)the duration of high sexual taboo words was underestimated for taboo-word stimuli relative to all other word types. The findings are discussed in the context of internal clock theories of time perception. - Emotion can affect our experience of time in different ways, determining whether we describe a passage of time as standing still or flying by. Research has shown that, when attention is diverted from the process of time keeping, the duration of events is experienced as lasting less time (i.e., time flies; see, e.g., Zakay & Fallach, 1984). Given that emotional stimuli can receive more attention (e.g., MacKay & Ahmetzanov, 2005; Schimmack, 2005; Tipples & Sharma, 2000), it is somewhat surprising that a number of recent studies (Droit-Volet, Brunot, & Niedenthal, 2004; Effron, Niedenthal, Gil, & Droit-Volet, 2006; Gil, Niedenthal, & Droit-Volet, 2007; Mondillon, Niedenthal, Gil, & Droit-Volet, 2007; Tipples, 2008) have shown that individuals perceive the duration of facial expressions of emotion as lasting longer than facial expressions that are neutral. The present study examines the effect of emotional word stimuli on time perception, the hypothesis being that taboo word stimuli receive more attention and, thus, lead to an underestimation of perceived time. Droit-Volet et al. (2004) used a temporal bisection task to study the effects of facial expressions on time. Participants were asked to estimate whether the durations of angry, happy, sad, and neutral facial expressions were more similar to either a short (400 msec) or long (1,600 msec) interval that they had learned earlier in the experiment. The expressions were presented for seven durations that ranged from short to long. Participants consistently overestimated the duration of the angry, happy, and sad facial expressions relative to the neutral expressions. Specifically, participants produced a higher proportion of long responses for emotional facial expressions than for neutral expressions, and the bisection point (BP; comparison duration giving rise to 50% of the long responses) decreased accordingly. The findings were interpreted within the context of internal clock theories of time processing (e.g., Gibbon, Church, & Meck, 1984). In general, these models include an arousal-sensitive pacemaker (Wearden, Philpott, & Win, 1999) that sends pulses (or units of elapsed time) to an accumulator via an attention-controlled switch that closes with the onset of the stimulus and opens again after offset. In the final stage, the presented duration is compared with the representation of the learned duration (the short and long durations in the bisection task) that is stored in reference memory. Arousal and attention are thought to affect different mechanisms within the internal clock. Increased arousal is thought to accelerate the rate of the pacemaker, leading to a greater number of counted units of time and, consequently, to an overestimation of time. Attending to nontemporal information (e.g., secondary task information) is thought to open the switch, leading to a loss of pulses entering the accumulator and, consequently, to an underestimation of time (e.g., Burle & Casini, 2001). Droit-Volet et al.s study supports the idea that observing facial expressions increased the rate of an internal pacemaker. Specifically, overestimation was greatest for faces appearing more highly aroused (angry facial expressions) than for faces appearing less aroused (i.e., sad facial expressions). Both underestimation and overestimation have been recorded for other types of emotional stimuli. Noulhiane, Mella, Samson, Ragot, and Pouthas (2007) examined the influence of emotional sounds on time perception. Participants were asked either to reproduce (Experiment 1) or to provide a verbal estimate (Experiment 2) of the duration of emotional auditory stimuli that lasted between 2 and 6 sec. Participants consistently judged emotional sounds as longer than neutral sounds. Furthermore, overestimation was greatest for negative sounds. However, in keeping with the idea of emotion capturing attention, participants more consistently underestimated the duration of high-arousal sounds than they did the duration of low-arousal sounds. A separate study (Angrilli, Cherubini, Pavese, & Manfredini, 1997), which examined the effects of emotional images on time perception, found that time estimates depended on both the valence and arousal of the stimuli. In particular, participants judged the duration of low-arousal negative pictures as shorter than the duration of low-arousal positive pictures, but they judged the duration of high-arousal negative pictures as longer than the duration of high-arousal positive pictures. This interaction effect was explained in terms of a double mechanism: More attentional resources were allocated to the processing of the more interesting low-arousal negative slides compared with the low-arousal positive slides; consequently, time was underestimated, because fewer attentional resources were available for time estimation. Overestimation of high-negative-arousal slides relative to high-positive-arousal slides was thought to reflect an emotion-driven appetitiveaversive process. Because participants were unable to avoid negative arousing pictures, those pictures were perceived as lasting too long (overestimation due to aversive motivation), whereas highly arousing positive slides were perceived as lasting not long enough (underestimation due to appetitive motivation). In summary, how arousal and valence affect time perception is dependent on whether the stimuli are pictures or sounds. How might emotional word stimuli affect time perception? Studies into the effects of emotional word stimuli on attention have recorded attentional bias for taboo words, but not for other types of words (e.g., Anderson, 2005; Arnell, Killman, & Fijavz, 2007; MacKay et al., 2004). For example, accuracy at identifying color names in rapid serial visual presentation is reduced if the words are preceded by arousing, sexually explicit, taboo words but not if they are preceded by negative, positive, or threatening words (Arnell et al., 2007). Typically, emotional (nontaboo) words do not bias attention (but see Sharma & McKenna, 2001) unless the emotional words are relevant to the ongoing concerns of the individual being tested (for a review of the supporting evidence, see Williams, Mathews, & MacLeod, 1996). In (...truncated)