Abstract
Introduction. According to recent studies, cognition and emotions are strictly connected to timing behaviour and time perception, even though the underling psychological mechanisms are not completely understood. Only recently the topic of time distortions in emotional contexts has attracted the attention of researchers, who typically used the classical methods of time perception. In particular, the most employed paradigms consisted of Temporal Bisection Task (comparing temporal stimuli to two reference stimuli, “long” and “short”) and Time Production. Here, for the first time, we propose a new paradigm based on the adjustment method, called Subjective Time Adjustment (STA), to evaluate time distortions in emotional contexts induced by visual stimuli. Methods. Thirty university students participated in this experiment and were divided in two groups (low vs. high arousal movies). All participants were tested individually in a quiet room. They were required to sit down and relax for about 10 minutes before starting the experiment. Then they were asked to adjust a flashing light in order to make its frequency equal to 60 flashes per minute: this measure was considered as individual baseline. After the baseline, participants were exposed to a five-minutes movie promoting either a low or a high arousal, depending on the assigned condition. After the movie, all participants were re-tested using the same method as the baseline. Results. The results showed that the adjustments made before and after the movie remained constant in the low arousal condition, but increased significantly in the high arousal condition. Conclusion. Our study shows that, similarly to previous studies, our STA paradigm can detect distortions in time perception due to the exposition to emotional movies.