Neuroticism and the Effects of Emotional Arousal and Valence on Time Perception of Visual Stimuli

Previous research has extensively examined the impact of stimulus properties on temporal perception, highlighting the inherently subjective nature of time perception and its susceptibility to influences of emotional content. The present study investigated the effects of emotional valence and arousal in visual stimuli on perceived duration, as well as the moderating role of individual differences in the personality dimension of neuroticism. We hypothesized that participants would overestimate the presentation duration of low-valence (negative emotion) stimuli and high-arousal stimuli relative to high-valence (positive emotion) stimuli and low-arousal stimuli. A two-interval discrimination paradigm employing the method of constant stimuli was used, in which participants compared the presentation duration of a picture with a fixed interval to another picture with systematically varied durations. Stimuli in Experiment 1 were varied in arousal level while stimuli in Experiment 2 were varied in emotional valence. Participants completed a two-alternative forced choice (2AFC) task to judge which stimulus in each trial appeared to last longer, followed by an assessment of neuroticism trait using the neuroticism subscale of the Big Five Inventory. Results indicated a significant temporal overestimation for high-arousal stimuli and low-valence stimuli. Both experiments suggested possible directional trends between neuroticism and temporal distortion elicited by emotional stimuli; however, these patterns did not reach statistical significance, possibly due to the brief stimulus exposure limiting trait-level emotional processing. Overall, the findings of the present study align with the attention-based and arousal-based internal clock model, suggesting that high-arousal and negative emotional content may heighten attentional focus on the stimulus, thus accelerating the pacemaker rate and increasing pulse accumulation, resulting in a subjective experience of expanded time.