The Covariation of Emotion and Passage of Time Judgments: Insights from Weibo

Previous studies have suggested that emotions influence individuals’ passage of time judgments (PoTJs). However, it remains unclear how this relationship manifests in daily life. Weibo provides a wealth of daily verbal expressions from individuals, offering valuable data for analyzing how emotions and PoTJs vary. Utilizing this resource and choosing a specific period of time—COVID-19—the authors innovatively examined the relationships between emotional valence, discrete emotions, and PoTJs across different timescales: weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, and over the entire year. First, they constructed a PoTJ lexicon and template based on Weibo data. This was followed by an analysis of emotional expressions in PoTJ-related posts extracted by the lexicon and template using natural language processing techniques. The findings reveal a distinct pattern: most individuals perceived time as passing quickly during the COVID-19 pandemic, while fewer experienced slow PoTJ. Regarding the relationship between emotional valence and PoTJ, the daily average percentage of posts expressing positive and negative emotions was positively correlated with fast and slow PoTJs from a dynamic perspective, respectively, and a similar pattern was found from an overall perspective. More importantly, a unique relationship was identified between discrete emotions and PoTJs. Specifically, both the dynamic and overall analyses showed a robust finding: only joy and anxiety were positively associated with fast and slow PoTJs, respectively. In contrast, for other emotions (e.g., hope, sadness), the dynamic analyses yielded inconsistent results across the different time windows, diverging from the overall analysis. These findings highlight the importance of adopting a dynamic perspective and considering discrete emotions when understanding the relationship between emotions and PoTJs.