Department of Psychology, National University of Singapore Singapore.
Front Integr Neurosci. 2011 Oct 5;5:58. doi: 10.3389/fnint.2011.00058. eCollection 2011.
Experimental evidence suggests that emotions can both speed-up and slow-down the internal clock. Speeding up has been observed for to-be-timed emotional stimuli that have the capacity to sustain attention, whereas slowing down has been observed for to-be-timed neutral stimuli that are presented in the context of emotional distractors. These effects have been explained by mechanisms that involve changes in bodily arousal, attention, or sentience. A review of these mechanisms suggests both merits and difficulties in the explanation of the emotion-timing link. Therefore, a hybrid mechanism involving stimulus-specific sentient representations is proposed as a candidate for mediating emotional influences on time. According to this proposal, emotional events enhance sentient representations, which in turn support temporal estimates. Emotional stimuli with a larger share in ones sentience are then perceived as longer than neutral stimuli with a smaller share.
实验证据表明，情绪既可以加速也可以减缓内部时钟。对于有能力维持注意力的待定时情绪刺激，观察到了加速现象，而对于在情绪干扰物背景下呈现的待定时中性刺激，则观察到了减速现象。这些效应可以通过涉及身体唤醒、注意力或感觉变化的机制来解释。对这些机制的回顾表明，在解释情绪与时间的联系时既有优点也有困难。因此，提出了一种混合机制，涉及特定于刺激的感觉表示，作为调节时间上的情绪影响的候选机制。根据这一建议，情绪事件增强了感觉表示，从而支持了时间估计。因此，在感觉中占比更大的情绪刺激比在感觉中占比更小的中性刺激被感知为更长。
