An investigation of the feeling that an inter-turn silence has lasted too long.

During conversations, there is often a short silence between the end of one turn and the beginning of the next. These silences tend to be brief. If a speaker waits too long before starting their turn it may trigger a negative interpretation (e.g., that the speaker is lying). We investigated whether the sense that a response took too long is related to the time it typically takes speakers in general to respond to a given question, participants' tendency to over- or underestimate temporal durations, and participants' level of general and social anxiety. Average response time for individual questions was related to variation in participants' sense that a response has taken too long, but biases in time perception, general anxiety, and social anxiety were not.