Time perception during emotional reviviscence: distinct contributions of duration estimation and passage-of-time judgment

Affective states are known to distort time perception, yet most studies rely on externally presented stimuli and rarely distinguish between duration estimation (DE) and passage-of-time judgment (PoTj). Across both studies, PoTj showed more robust affective modulation than DE, whereas DE appeared to be less sensitive to affective context. Participants relived positive and negative autobiographical emotions during a fixed 76-s interval. Study 1 revealed that positive emotions were associated with shorter duration estimates and a faster subjective passage of time than negative emotions, while boredom exhibited a distinctive temporal profile. Study 2 replicated these findings, introduced a daily-commute autobiographical reference condition, and showed that boredom remained the only emotion consistently differing from the commute condition. Across both studies, PoTj showed more robust affective modulation than DE, whereas DE displayed greater structural stability across affective contexts. An exploratory factor analysis tentatively suggested that DE exhibited a more stable organisation across emotional conditions, whereas PoTj appeared more closely related to affective context. Together, these findings indicate that DE and PoTj are related but non-interchangeable temporal judgments that differ in their sensitivity to affective states, while illustrating the usefulness of autobiographical emotional reviviscence as a paradigm for investigating affective influences on time perception.