The Effect of the Intensity of Withdrawal-Motivation Emotion on Time Perception: Evidence Based on the Five Temporal Tasks

This study explored the difference between the high and low intensity of withdrawal-motivation emotion on time perception. Meanwhile, we explored whether this difference could be generalized to all temporal tasks. Five different temporal tasks involving the presentation of high intensity and low intensity of withdrawal-motivation emotional body pictures were tested: temporal bisection task, temporal generalization task, verbal estimation task, temporal reproduction task, and temporal production task. A total of 195 college students were randomly assigned to one of five temporal tasks (each task comprising 39 participants). Our findings revealed an overestimation of duration for the high-intensity withdrawal-motivation emotion, as opposed to low intensity, in the temporal bisection, verbal estimation, and reproduction tasks. However, this overestimation of duration for the high intensity of withdrawal-motivation emotion was not observed in the temporal generalization and production tasks. In conclusion, these results indicated that attention plays a crucial role in the influence of emotional motivation intensity on time perception based on the pacemaker-accumulator model.