ArticleCognition2020
Anxiety makes time pass quicker while fear has no effect.
Article in Cognition, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 29 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
29 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Emotional states affect the degree of duration distortion more than distortion direction: a meta-analytic research.Psychological research · 2025Pooled it
- The effects of hydrocortisone and yohimbine on human behavior in approach-avoidance conflicts.Psychopharmacology · 2023Trial
- Simultaneous manipulation of emotion and working memory load distorts temporal distance memory.Memory & cognition · 2026Article
- Hypnotizability and Time Reproduction.Cerebellum (London, England) · 2026Article
- Cerebellar Time and Relative Time: A Comparator-Based Dynamical Timing Model and its Relevance to Psychopathology and Therapies.Cerebellum (London, England) · 2026Review
- Time to think of love, leisure, terror, and despair: emotional imagery affects temporal cognition.Psychological research · 2026Article
- Anxiety makes time pass quicker: neural correlates.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Article
- State-Dependent Distortions of Short-Range Internal Timing: A Narrative Review Across Stress, Anxiety, Depression, Parkinson's Disease, and Epilepsy.Journal of clinical medicine · 2026Review
- How virtual urban green spaces influence stress and risk-taking.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- An investigation of the feeling that an inter-turn silence has lasted too long.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Article
- Dynamic affective stimulation modulates visual but not auditory prospective timing.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Time Dilation in Motivational Congruence Theory's Paradigm.Integrative psychological & behavioral science · 2025Article
- Interoceptive signals and emotional states shape temporal perception through heart rate modulation.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Article
- Sense of time is slower following exhaustive cycling exercise.Psychological research · 2024Article
- Manipulating reinforcement probability changes the temporal overestimation of anticipated aversive stimuli.Psychological research · 2024Article
- Anticipation of sexually arousing visual event leads to overestimation of elapsed time.PloS one · 2024Article
- Longitudinal analysis of social isolation effects on finger tapping in the Blursday database.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Biologia Futura: does the aging process contribute to the relativity of time?Biologia futura · 2023Review
- Influence of Recent Trial History on Interval Timing.Neuroscience bulletin · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
People often say that during unpleasant events, e.g. traumatic incidents such as car accidents, time slows down (i.e. time is overestimated). However aversive events can elicit at least two dissociable subtypes of reactions: fear (transient and relating to an imminent event) and anxiety (diffuse and relating to an unpredictable event). We hypothesised that anxiety might have an opposite effect on time perception compared to fear. To test this we combined a robust anxiety manipulation (threat-of-shock) with a widely used timing task in which participants judged whether the duration of a stimulus was long or short. In line with our hypothesis, across three experiments (with varying stimulus timings and shock levels), participants significantly underestimated time under inducted anxiety, as indicated by a rightward shift of the psychophysical function (meta-analytic effect size: d = 0.68, 95% confidence interval: 0.42-0.94). In two further studies, we were unable to replicate previous findings that fear leads to time overestimation, after adapting our temporal cognition task, which suggests a dissociation between fear and anxiety on how they affect time perception. Our results suggest that experimentally inducing anxiety leads to underestimating the duration of temporal intervals, which might be a starting point in explaining different subjective experiences of disorders related to fear (e.g. post-traumatic stress disorder) and anxiety (e.g. generalised anxiety disorder).
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.