Time perception plays a fundamental role in human social activities, and it can be influenced in social situations by various factors, including facial attractiveness. However, in the eyes of observers of different genders, the attractiveness of a face varies. The current study aimed to explore whether gender modulates the effect of facial attractiveness on time perception. To account for individual differences in esthetic standards, the critical stimuli presented to each participant were selected from an image pool based on the participant’s own attractiveness judgments. In Experiment 1, men and women performed a stimuli selection task followed by a temporal reproduction task to measure their time perception of faces of different attractiveness levels and gender. To control for the potential influence of task order, Experiment 2 flipped the order of the selection and temporal tasks. Taken together, the experiments showed that both men and women exhibited longer reproduced durations for attractive opposite-sex faces than for unattractive opposite-sex faces; conversely, in the same-sex face condition, women still exhibited longer reproduced durations for attractive faces than for unattractive faces, whereas the effect of facial attractiveness on time perception among men tended to be smaller or even fail to reach significance. These results suggest that gender differences play an important role in the effect of facial attractiveness on time perception.

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Time perception plays a fundamental role in people’s daily life activities, and it is modulated by changes in environmental contexts. Recent studies have observed that attractive faces generally result in temporal dilation and have proposed increased arousal to account for such dilation. However, there is no direct empirical result to evidence such an account. The aim of the current study, therefore, was to clarify the relationship between arousal and the temporal dilation effect of facial attractiveness by introducing a rating of arousal to test the effect of arousal on temporal dilation (Experiment 1) and by regulating arousal via automatic expression suppression to explore the association between arousal and temporal dilation (Experiment 2). As a result, Experiment 1 found that increased arousal mediated the temporal dilation effect of attractive faces; Experiment 2 showed that the downregulation of arousal attenuated the temporal dilation of attractive faces. These results highlighted the role of increased arousal, which is a dominating mechanism of the temporal dilation effect of attractive faces.

Surface recovery of landslides triggered by 2008 Ms8.0 Wenchuan earthquake (China): a case study in a typical mountainous watershed Abstract The Ms8.0 Wenchuan earthquake that occurred on 12 May 2008 in southwestern China and triggered numerous landslides is one of the stronger ones in the steep eastern margins of the Tibetan Plateau. The surfaces of these landslides have recovered gradually with vegetation, which provide useful information about the evolution of geologic environment as well as the longterm assessment of landslides after earthquake. The Mianyuanhe watershed shows many co-seismic landslides. The active fault passing through its center is selected as a study area aiming to analyze the annual surface recovery rate (SRR) of landslides by interpretation of remote-sensing images in five periods from 2008 to 2013. The results are here described.(1) Although a large amount of loose deposits were transformed into debris flows, the surfaces of the landslides recovered rapidly with vegetation and almost no landslides occurred at new sites after the Wenchuan earthquake. In the year 2008, the exposed surface projected area (ESPA) of the landslides showed a total area of 56.3 km 2 and covered 28.9 % of the study area, which was reduced rapidly to 19.1 % in 2011 and 15.8 % in 2013. (2) The study area was divided into four geologic units, including clastic rocks, melange zone, carbonate rocks, and magmatic rocks. Smaller ESPAs and higher SRRs were found in the former two units versus the latter ones. (3) A single large landslide shows an SRR lower than a group of smaller ones having an equal total surface, while the SRRs of debris flows are lower than those of rockfalls and landslides. (4) The vegetation cover would return to the pre-earthquake level in 2020 approximately, which indicates that the impact of the Wenchuan earthquake on landslides and debris-flows activities would cease almost completely.